Perfecting Lonliness Perfects Emo

It's impossible to review the third album by New York quartet Jets To Brazil without using a dirty word.

Reader discretion advised: Those who have never lain awake worrying that the house might burn down before morning, who prefer Bowflex to Baudelaire, might find this three-letter expletive puzzling. Those whose style of punk-influenced alternative rock it describes often find the offending phrase, well, offensive.

The word (children, shield your eyes) is "emo."

Marketers behind pop-punk acts from Saves The Day to Newfound Glory have so abused this innocuous little expression that even the music's leading apostles deny, St. Peter-like, their own association with it. Hipsters and indie-rock elitists consider the genre dead as disco or, more tellingly, ska.

Maybe they're right. But for music fans too self-aware to sport emo's geek-chic sweaters and Buddy Holly eyewear now that 12-year-old Boxcar Racer fans do the same, Perfecting Loneliness promises a beautiful post-emo afterlife.

Emo began as punk rock for wimps. Pioneered by Washington, D.C., bands Fugazi and Embrace in the 1980s, the intricate melancholy of "emotional hardcore" sparked a nationwide underground movement.

At the vanguard stood the members of what is now Jets To Brazil: frontman Blake Schwarzenbach with seminal emo band Jawbreaker, drummer Chris Daly with Texas Is The Reason and bassist/vocalist Jeremy Chatelain with Handsome.

Joined by guitarist Brian Maryansky in 1999, Jets released two uneven, critically acclaimed albums - 1998's "Orange Rhyming Dictionary" and "Four Cornered Night" in 2000 - that at times, particularly on delicate ballads "Sweet Avenue" and "Sea Anemone," even surpassed their previous work.

Meanwhile, several acts with ties to The Genre Formerly Known As Emo hit commercial pay dirt this year, including Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional and the Get Up Kids.

With Dashboard vocalist Chris Carrabba yelping his wish to be "anywhere, with anyone, making out" in the hit "Screaming Infidelities," it's no surprise other emo bands prefer to distance themselves from their genre, which the Los Angeles Times recently dubbed "the new grunge."

One group, Milwaukee-based Promise Ring, eschewed emo for a melody-first Britpop aesthetic on its 2002 release, "Wood/Water," but the often-cerebral record achieved only modest critical and commercial success.

Perfecting Loneliness, like "Wood/Water," takes an intellectual high road, and even hints at British influences from David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in parts of anthemic album-closer "Rocket Boy" to the balls-out rock of the Who in politically conscious "Disgrace."

The similarities end there. The interlocking dual guitar parts on Perfecting Loneliness are too jagged, the vocals too plaintive, the arrangements too apt to build to roiling, unfettered emotional crescendos -- in other words, too emo.
Call it "post-emo" -- quick, before some marketing exec does.

Evocative lyrics have always been Schwarzenbach's strength, and this album is full of gems. "I don't want to be the one who always waits / for you to 'wait and see,'" he emotes in "Autumn Walker," an intricate mid-tempo number about an old friend leaving as the birds migrate south. "When people grow, people go."

Elegant, intensely personal ballad "Further North" mines the same emotional ground as the best of Jets' older songs, but without giving up its musical distinctiveness (a problem on several tracks, such as the otherwise lovely "Lucky Charm" or "Psalm," which employ similar chord progressions). The song's late December vibe is the perfect follow-up to "Autumn Walker," and its chorus is, quite simply, gorgeous: "Everything here is about to break / I'm one inch from more than I can take / so tonight let's stay inside / I'll be the husband with a book for a bride."

Schwarzenbach's earnest, vivid lyrics become more amazing with each successive listen. It takes a while, for instance, to pick up on the couplet "we live like astronauts / and our missions never cross" in the title track, a song which builds to a spacey, Spiritualized-esque denouement sprinkled with samples of Apollo 11 radio communications.

Allusions to travel, whether outer-space or otherwise, abound throughout the album, culminating in the epic "Rocket Boy," which succeeds in its expansive length and subject matter because of its intimately rendered vocals. The narrator in "The Frequency" says he is "breaking the silence at the speed of sound." And multiple songs make reference to "lists," perhaps echoing the pre-flight checklists undergone by NASA crews.

This space-travel motif is by no means as overriding as, say, Wilco's obsession with long-distance communication in "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," but it indicates an attention to album cohesion lacking in most mainstream rock.
As the last wistful guitar chords of the title track fade away, an astronaut's crackly voice sums up the album: "Magnificent desolation."

Jets To Brazil haven't quite perfected loneliness, but they've created one of the year's best CDs and, in the process, a more perfect emo.

Just don't call it that.