Don’t take it personally if the literal meanings within Frame & Canvas remain elusive after a quarter century: Braid themselves aren’t entirely sure what it’s about either. Five years ago, upon the 20th anniversary of their brilliant third album, singer/guitarist Chris Broach admitted he couldn’t make heads or tails of “Ariel,” while co-frontman Bob Nanna favored a kind of physical impressionism, the actual lyrics bearing little resemblance to the points of inspiration captured in its tail-chasing melody. The most narrow reading of Frame & Canvas plays up its importance by taking its title at face value, rendering it a snapshot of a very specific milieu: 1998 graduating class at the University of Illinois. The most accurate reading is what everyone outside of the world recognizes in its fitful dynamics and irrepressible exuberance: “a dream for the teens and in-betweens, and twenties yet unseen,” making “the leap” not to level up or climb the ladder, but rather to fly blindly into whatever comes next. It’s that last quality which makes Frame & Canvas the platonic ideal for what Midwest emo has to offer. The music is cerebral and introspective yet subject to unpredictable physical impulse; the musicianship is acrobatic but too jittery to reveal its virtuosity; the lyrics embody a sense of wanting to experience everything the world has to offer while trying not to be paralyzed by the fear of missing out on any of it. Frame & Canvas begins on an airplane, ends in a tour van, and spends its entirety in motion. The center of “The New Nathan Detroits” only holds if all four members charge at equal and opposite speeds. The chorus of “Collect From Clark Kent” sticks a seemingly impossible landing after consecutive backflips, emo’s equivalent to a Biles II. “I drink too much and you sing too much,” Nanna hyperventilates on a song called “Breathe In.” There are prettier songs, but no ballads: “Never Will Come For Us” and “I Keep a Diary” twinkle and sigh as the wheels keep spinning, Nanna watching vast stretches of anonymous America pass by, “as slow as Rapid City.”
Even Nanna’s lyrics refuse to stay in one place, words constantly nudging themselves into new shapes, the product of a fidgety mind forced to entertain itself through hours of idle time: “A cast of kittens, the cats we’ve been kissing,” “If deception is fine, then this is divine/Define divine,” “You’re moving like a movie.” All the while, outsiders try to alter the trajectory. Parents beg for a moment of reflection to consider the future, not just what lies ahead in the next week or the next college town. “When the boys want in/Boys will be boys/Boys will be poison boys,” Nanna warns on the prophetic “Urbana’s Too Dark,” the title alluding to a movement at the U of I to install more street lights as a prevention measure against sexual assaults. Friends urge them to ignore punk’s self-defeating ideals (“Let’s not settle for satisfaction/We are women and men of action/Let’s stop clapping, let’s start doing”), as there will be plenty of time to paint floors after we’re done naming the stars. “Collect From Clark Kent” memorably compares long distance romance to Superman getting trapped in a phone booth. The most memorable hook doubles as Braid’s modus operandi: Go!
These strengths were all loudly apparent in 1998 and every year leading up to this one. Upon this remixed and remastered 25th anniversary reissue, Frame & Canvas is not a Numero Group-style excavation nor is Braid experiencing an unexpected uptick in relevance aside from an obvious anniversary. Though the reputation of emo as a whole has fluctuated wildly since Braid first broke up in 1999, Frame & Canvas has been held in fairly constant esteem, perhaps more so than any album of its era other than Diary. So it’s fair to ask a question that should accompany any reissue that arrives without a wealth of unheard material: Why?
Though Braid had compiled a dozen indelible songs before they entered a studio, they were short on technical know-how and shorter on funds. This is exactly the kind of situation that led aspirational emo bands to work with J. Robbins during this era, but I’d argue his impact as a producer was more symbolic in 1998. Getting out of town to record in Virginia’s Inner Ear studios lent Frame & Canvas a legitimacy that their previous albums, Frankie Welfare Boy Age 5 and The Age of Octeen, lacked, putting Braid in conversation with Texas Is the Reason, the Promise Ring, and, of course, Jawbox. Between the playfully orchestrated combat of Nanna and Broach’s vocals and the cruel swing of new drummer Damon Atkinson, what were Braid if not a Dischord band without the hang-ups towards emo’s melody and sentimentality?
I’m not gonna lie and say I’ve compared the sound waves side by side; listen to the intro from both versions of “Killing a Camera” back to back and in the remaster, the drums are punchier, the bass louder, the sort of things I’d guess would happen if I simply raised the volume on the original. But throughout Frame & Canvas, there’s greater sense of space in the mix, more pronounced dynamics, more texture in Atkinson’s kinetic drumming, more opportunities to hear Broach creeping around the margins of any given verse before he barges in for the chorus.
If Braid seems like a band that carries more respect than influence, then Frame & Canvas argues that this is largely a result of their inimitability; it’s not easy to sing like Jeremy Enigk or come up with an American Football guitar harmony, but at least you know what to shoot for. Have you ever tried to play a Braid song on a solo acoustic? The more each individual member of Braid gets isolated on the remix, the more clear it becomes how inseparable they are from the whole. Their 2014 album No Coast—still the finest of the “revival”-era reunions—is perhaps the best evidence of this, as streamlined and immediate as anything from Hey Mercedes, but unmistakably more propulsive and vital. You can’t just chalk it up to Broach returning to the fold; 16 years after Frame & Canvas, he wasn’t even screaming anymore.
On the album’s first lyric, Nanna yelps, “1998 looked great on plain white paper,” rightfully assuming that their future was unwritten in spite of their best plans. Frame & Canvas was an unequivocal triumph, not just for Braid, but also for the Champaign-based upstart Polyvinyl Records and thus, the entire concept of Midwest emo. They subsequently toured with ascendant peers in Compound Red and the Get Up Kids and, later, Warped Tour icons All and Less Than Jake. Braid eventually made it to Japan and Hawaii by April 1999 and then broke up months later. “It’s pointless to play if you don’t get paid,” Nanna snarls on “The New Nathan Detroits,” and if touring wasn’t exactly pointless by 1999, it wasn’t sustainable either, mostly for the usual reasons—creative differences that would spawn Hey Mercedes and the Firebird Band, arguments about money and accommodations, regrets about putting relationships and education second. Yet, knowing how the story ends doesn’t mean the optimism and confidence of Frame & Canvas rings false. As much as it’s about Champaign or emo in 1998 or sleeping on floors, it’s an enduring testament to college grads recognizing the terrifying prospects of adulthood and still believing they can power through anything with the momentum of blind faith.
