Beta Minus Mechanic

Beta Minus Mechanic were a band from Syracuse, NY, active from the mid to late 90s and possibly for a little bit after that, though it's unlikely they were together long past the turn of the millennium. Most of their work was released on Crisis Records, which was a strange subsidiary of the legendary Revelation Records. Crisis was—at least initially—focused on female-fronted bands, according to Discogs. Why Revelation couldn't just host these female-fronted bands is a mystery to me. One of the band members was in Earth Crisis, giving them a connection to the straight edge scene.

Musically, Beta Minus Mechanic were a 90s emo pop band with a great deal of influence from post-hardcore, alternative, and even a little bit of midwest emo; I've seen comparisons to Ashes and Copper, which I only partially agree with, as Beta Minus Mechanic was more pop-oriented and takes a great deal more from the alternative scene than either of those bands.

I believe the band's first release was the split 7" with likeminded band Holden, followed by the '69 Camaro EP in the same year. I don't have a precise date for either and it feels like the logical progression, but it's possible the EP came before the split. In 1997 the band put out their only LP, Disassembly Required. Three years later in 2000, the band had a very interesting contribution to the Syracuse Hardcore 98.99 compilation: two songs taken from the EP and the LP but rerecorded as spare, piano-and-vocals versions, a somewhat odd inclusion for what is purportedly a hardcore comp. Considering the gap between this compilation and the album, I don't know if the tracks were a posthumous contribution or if the band was still active up to that year.

Beta Minus Mechanic

Time To Fly

 Time To Fly were a band from Port Orchard, Washington, formed in 2001. Wikipedia says the band was active until 2005, but their website went offline in 2004, so that may not be correct. They are best known for their contributions to that holy grail of aughts emo pop, the Amped snowboarding series of games; more than half of the band's debut album was included in Xbox 360 launch title Amped 3 (fellow Pacific Northwest natives Woke Up Falling also contributed). The Amped series included such emo luminaries as Time Spent Driving, Sunday's Best, The Jazz June, and The Get Up Kids, but for the purposes of comparison I think it's important to specifically note the inclusion of Eleventeen, Brandston, and Places To Park. That's the frame that Time To Fly existed in, a combination of 90s and early 2000s emo pop with influences from midwest emo and, more prominently, alternative.

The band's first album is also their only album, 2002's birth.work.death. Their only other material seems to be three demos recorded the following year, which are available on this Bandcamp. The demos find the band moving away from emo pop towards indie rock, and it would have been interesting to see if that's where they went with a second album.

birth.work.death

Late Night Television

 Late Night Television were a band from Philadelphia. Started in 1995 as a solo project for the output of vocalist Matt Kelley, he eventually assembled a band and they were putting out records by 1998 on what appears to have been Kelley's own label, Route 14. Their list of influences on their old Interpunk band page includes The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and Superchunk. I mostly hear the latter, but the other two are present. 

At times, the line between indie rock, alternative rock, and the more mainstream(ish) forms of emo seems thin enough to be insubstantial. I think this is why hardcore-focused purists sometimes argue that midwest emo and emo pop do not belong under the umbrella of emo at all, but instead should be shunted into some other, more radio-friendly camp. Imagine Mineral's "Gloria" coming on the classic hits radio right after "Alex Chilton" and you may understand that there's a little more granularity to the situation than that. I think my stances on the genres are made clear enough by this blog, but I'm not interested in arguing the point; and in this case, I don't think I'd even make the argument that Late Night Television were an emo pop band—not on the first album, anyway. But they were an emo-influenced band (a claim I couldn't make for Zykos), and that puts them in my purview.

Kelley started the project in 1995; the band saw it's first release in 1998 with a 7" single. I have little doubt there's material that either the band or just Kelley recorded between '95 and '98, but I can't find any of it, and unfortunately have also not been able to get my hands on the 7". A year later they put out their first album, 11 Love Songs For Your Shallow, Broken Heart. The liner notes show the songs are copyrighted from 1996-1998, so the album may include songs that Kelley wrote when he was still solo.

It would take another three years for the band to gestate that second album, A Personal Account of How I Failed At Everything (while even the first album is at least emo-adjacent, it must be said that the album\song titles and lyrics make both seem even more emo than they are in practice). It amps up the emo pop influences, to the point they reminded me of Chocolate Kiss sometimes, and even, at other times, more aggressive bands—"white picket fences" has some genuine emo rawness.

An archive of the Route 14 site shows the band also had a live recorded session on WPRB in 2003. At the moment I can only offer FLAC downloads for both LPs.

11 love songs for your shallow, broken heart + a personal account of how i've failed at everything

Staircase

Staircase were a band from Braunschweig, Germany, and are not to be confused with American screamo band Staircase. They formed in 2000 and I'm not sure when they called it quits; they added a band member in 2003, and were still updating their website until 2007, though there is one more update after that which makes it look like they may have been playing shows sporadically all the way to 2010. Whatever the case, they never released material after 2002.

Staircase's sound was a mix of alt rock and emo pop, at least on their first release, which was the sound of our blue thoughts EP in 2000. On their subsequent 2002 full length, an ironic view (full of cynical abstractions), the band embraced the emo pop half of their original sound and sprinkled in a little post-hardcore influence.

the sound of our blue thoughts + an ironic view (full of cynical abstractions)