E-Mail This Article to a Friend Emo-plus The Promise Ring’s Davey von Bohlen re-emerges with Maritime BY MIKAEL WOOD

Is there a subset of rock and roll less adaptable to the process of aging than emo? The form is practically built upon the idea of a young man (or, very occasionally, a young woman) grappling with the vagaries of the twentysomething condition: forming an identity, navigating parental expectations, sussing friends’ motivations, and, of course, surviving the type of romantic turbulence so in need of thoughtful exegeses that the Web log might as well have been invented to handle the overflow.

For the latter half of the 1990s, Davey von Bohlen, the frontman of Milwaukee’s the Promise Ring, wrote songs about that experience. He even managed a few great ones: "A Picture Postcard," about not wanting a lover to leave; "Skips a Beat," about wanting to relive certain high-emotion moments in order to handle them better; "Red & Blue Jeans," about a lover’s "white and night things." The Promise Ring became one of emo’s highest-profile bands, eventually signing with Anti- Records, an imprint of the venerable Los Angeles indie Epitaph. With a budget larger than any they’d ever had, they decamped to London in late 2001 to make Wood/Water with Stephen Street, a producer renowned for his work with Britpop giants the Smiths and Blur.

It was to be the Promise Ring’s entrée into the polite society of grown-up alterna-rock. But instead of a polished set of mature pop-rock tunes, Wood/Water became a confused experiment, its songs stranded in a no-fly zone between emo’s caffeinated chug and the bleary alterna-country of the Wilco set. In trying to remake emo as a form reflective of the thirtysomething condition, von Bohlen had inadvertently come up with a crappy approximation of the Goo Goo Dolls. Three years later, he won’t disown Wood/Water, but he admits that time has revealed some of its faults. "I think you can put a metronome to it and pretty much listen to it all the way through," he says over the phone from his home in Milwaukee, referring to the album’s endless mid-tempo blur. The Promise Ring broke up within a year of Wood/Water’s 2002 release. But von Bohlen wasn’t finished attempting to develop emo beyond its undergraduate confines: the following year, he formed a new group called In English with Ring drummer Dan Didier. Before long, In English had become Maritime, and von Bohlen and Didier had written, arranged, and demo’d an album’s worth of songs. They just needed a bass player.

"If you’re looking for 29-year-old musicians who are just waiting to start their music career, you’re not gonna find many," von Bohlen laughs. "You’re either 19 and hungry for it or you’re in a band. And we didn’t necessarily want to get two kids who were going to be young adults and spazz out — like, ‘Whoa, tour! This is what it’s like!’ "

Instead, they turned to Eric Axelson, the bassist in DC’s Dismemberment Plan, contemporaries of Promise Ring who had called it quits right about the same time. Axelson joined Maritime, writing bass parts for the songs von Bohlen and Dider had workshopped and entering a series of studios with them and producer J. Robbins (formerly of Jawbox) to record what has become Maritime’s debut. And Glass Floor (DeSoto) succeeds where Wood/Water didn’t — it rejiggers emo for folks who’ve outgrown their first pair of brown corduroys.

Von Bohlen’s signature tone-poetry is intact. "Our teeth are wood," he sings in "King of Doves," "In the rusty air, our blood is wine." But signs of aging litter Glass Floor’s 13 songs. In "Someone Has To Die," the singer/guitarist reflects on the life cycle; in "James," he observes that "you’ll go to any length to feel like you felt yesterday"; in "Sleep Around," he even kicks everyone out of a party at his place — "the kid in the back is tearing all of my posters down." The music, too, is a ripened version of the Promise Ring’s hyperactive guitar pop, making room for gingerly strummed acoustic guitars and bouncy piano parts without slowing things down to a rheumatic crawl. It’s a modest little album — sweet and meaningful and a little cheesy here and there. And one it took von Bohlen’s departure from emo’s psychic hothouse to make.

"There’s so much else going on that’s really important," he says of his life these days and music’s place in it. "If somebody in the band said, ‘Hey, I really can’t fit this in. I’d like to, but I gotta walk away,’ I’d be 100 percent behind that person. Even if it was me, you know?"