Emo in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

At 19 I had an Adven­ture­land–style summer, working at a Barnie’s Coffee in the local mall—remember Barnie’s Coffee? The place charmed, in a free­wheeling, no-one-gives a shit kind of way. One co-worker was loud, hot, and reg­u­larly stole from the till so she could buy Oxys; another sold them to her. Not nearly as depraved, I mostly con­cerned myself with how loudly I could play the stereo. But I always enjoyed watching them tear through, seri­ously, cases of whip­pits in the back. Yea, the store folded a few months later.

One day another co-worker, and a 2001 emo-redux trans­plant from out of state, plugged her shitty Dell laptop into the stereo. Hmm. Wistful pop, jangly guitar and girl-next-door vocals utterly free of impu­ri­ties. “Hey can I burn this?” Over the ensuing years I’ve lis­tened to the EP count­less times, con­sci­en­tiously trans­fer­ring the songs from disc to desktop to Nomad Jukebox mp3 player to Mac­book. No tag infor­ma­tion on the files—I only remem­bered her saying that they were a local band called… the Maccabees?

Some­times you don’t do things until some invis­ible switch is flicked on inside you. I sup­pose I could’ve looked them up at any point, but I liked how the mys­tery gave them a cer­tain aura—that and I’m kind of lazy. But the other night, after nine years plus another half hour of Googling, I dis­cov­ered that there was, indeed, a local Florida band by that name [ed. note: not to be con­fused with the scruffily hoodied Brits of the same name].

So the Mac­cabees, as it turns out, were a sequel to the mar­gin­ally better-known band Pohgoh, who ran from ’94-’98 and were fea­tured on the sem­inal Emo Diaries Volume I com­pi­la­tion. After the they broke up, singer Susie Ulrey wrote a bunch of tunes, and along with hus­band Keith she formed the Mac­cabees to play them out. This, as I under­stand it, went on until about 2001 or so. Part of the long-running Tampa scene, most recently this crew has released a one-off recording under the name Pre­fontaine.

The Mac­cabees — “Abingdon”

I would highly rec­om­mend you pur­chase what I now know to be their beau­tiful Songs from the Weakest Link EP. Even though some of the mys­tery is gone, I’m glad to learn that these guys man­aged to carve out a DIY career, that they were able to make music a part of their lives and locale in a way that, for better or worse, I don’t think can be quite repli­cated anymore.