Once upon a time, a band could name itself after a 19th century Austrian modernist poet without coming across precious. The members of a band could sing about talking about the last time it felt right to make out, and nobody would laugh. Twenty years ago, irony was already sweeping through underground rock music like a purifying plague, but sensitive, tortured kids who wore their collective heart on their sleeve could still take themselves seriously without flaunting their self-consciousness. It wasn't cool, exactly, but it wasn't perilously uncool either, especially when the band was great. Rainer Maria were great. From where I was sitting they were among the very best bands of that late-'90s moment when emo felt like the most exciting thing on the indie rock landscape, when kids were still figuring out how to fuse the headlong abandon of punk rock with the thoughtful, allusive intricacy of indie rock without trying to fit into an established mold. Rainer Maria were great because they could sing in grandiloquent, self-serious journal-poetry scribbles -- "And I'm certain if I drive into those trees / It would make less of a mess than you've made of me" -- with all the urgency that those feelings demand. They were great because they figured out ways to turn post-Slint tension-and-release dynamics into impactful, resonant three-minute epics. They were great because, onstage, they turned their roiling, internal churn into big, physical party music, sliding across stages and throwing themselves around rooms. And now they're back, and they're great again, for different reasons.