Rainer Maria - Look Now Look Again (1999)
Artist: Rainer Maria
Author: Sarah
Date: 08/02/2025
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
I've been listening to this one a lot recently; over the past couple months it's gone from merely my favorite emo album to one of my all-time favorites of any genre. With Look Now Look Again, Rainer Maria takes their first swing at being a pop band, and totally succeeds at it. At the time of writing, this album is one of a very few which are capable of getting five or six different songs simultaneously stuck in my head: a massive achievement for a nine-song album!
Part of that is because they do a really good job with the dynamics on this album; take for example, "Planetary" or "Feeling Neglected", which slowly builds up to those choruses that you just can't help but shout along to. Another part of it is that they can repeat a phrase just the right number of times to drill it into your brain without getting annoying about it (such as on "Broken Radio" or "Lost, Dropped and Cancelled").
Most importantly, Caithlin and Kaia have a really great vocal dynamic going on here. I'm a total sucker for when singers overlap their vocals, and there's certainly no exception to that here. Lately, I think the chorus of "Centrifuge" has been my favorite part of the album, and it's all because of that counterpoint.
It's kind of weird that I like this as much as I do, because no other Rainer Maria album even comes close to it. I suppose it's because they managed to capture that sweet spot where there's a good deal of indie pop, but still enough rough edges that it can't just slide right past you. A lot of the time, the so-called "transitional album" gets a bad reputation; we tend to think of it as the album where an original sound is already played-out and the new direction hasn't been fully formed yet. But Look Now Look Again stands as proof that the much-maligned transitional album can also be capable of embodying the best parts of the eras it bridges, and even creating something better than the sum of those parts.