Phase four: "post-emo indie rock" and post-emo post-hardcore. Sunny Day Real Estate, Christie Front Drive, Promise Ring, Mineral, Boys Life, Sideshow, Get-Up Kids, Braid, Cap'n Jazz, then later Joan of Arc, Jets To Brazil, etc. Lots of Caulfield and Crank! Records bands, more lately a lot of stuff on Jade Tree for instance.
-Anyone that claims to like both straight-edge and emo is probably talking about this kind of emo. Starts out near Colorado and Seattle, explodes all over the Midwest, then onward to New York, etc. In fact an early term for this kind of music was "midwest emo," as these bands seemed to come out of nowhere towns in Missouri, Kansas, Colorado...
-Musically, tends toward a lot of loud/soft interation, but a lot of softly-sung vocals and very little screaming or harshness. Lots of catchy, poppy guitar riffs, happiness or at least melancholy, and a particular fascination with off-key, cutesy boy vocals. This is where the phrase "twinkly guitar parts" comes from - lots of pretty major-key arpeggios, light drumming, and some amount of crooning. It sounds like a recipe for cheeze, and sometimes is. I remember reading a review of the early Christie Front Drive 12" that said, "this is what emo kids listen to when they make love." It was a nice alternative to a steady diet of hardcore.
-There is a valid element of emo in the vocals here (along with occasional octave chord). It's not as easy to identify as the mournful screaming in the original emo style, tending to consist more of greatly drawn-out phrases detailing very emotional lyrics with ironically light and poppy singing.
-Sunny Day Real Estate came up with a very original post-hardcore meets emocore at an indie rock show sound. This inspired a spawn of imitators even more shameless than the Fugazi and Quicksand clones. Which leads one to observe: post-hardcore emerged when the hardcore scene tired of the same seven-year-old sounds inspired by a few innovative hardcore bands. A few innovative post-hardcore bands come out with a totally new sound out of nowhere (Fugazi, Quicksand, SDRE, Drive Like Jehu), and spawn legions of imitators. Basically straight out of Thomas Kuhn's theories...
-By 1999, this type of music had achieved a fan base far larger than any of the original emo stuff. In fact, that's what prompted me to write this website in the first place - the glut of info on the web about this and the lack of a historical perspective. Statistically, you the reader are most likely to be familiar with this type of emo. In the years since then, it's only grown far, far bigger. Jimmy Eat World and Thursday are in regular rotation on MTV and many corporate alternative radio stations, and sappy music like this Dashboard Confessional fellow is pulling in a whole new audience. This is well on its way to becoming a major demographic market, soon after which we'll see a lot of new bands with zero real connection to the original underground scene (unlike for instance Jimmy Eat World, who used to open at every emo show in Phoenix way back in 1994).