Before Braille album spanning the history of the band. 20 SONGS! 2 Triple split songs newly recorded + 3 songs from The Rumor recorded acoustically + 5 out of print compilation songs + 10 brand new & unreleased. A new album and a flash to the past all in one! Past reviews: (there were many. here are the first two i ran across) CMJ New Music Report Spotlight Brad Filicky, CMJ There must be something in the water in Mesa, Arizona. The same town that gave us Jimmy Eat World has now given us Before Braille, a band that specializes in the heartbreaking lyrics delivered passionately over a syncopated but poppy guitar crunch that has come to define the term "emo." And everybody knows that emo is the music du jour for sensitive punk boys and girls right now, but if emo goes out of style, Before Braille will likely still be rocking shows long after most of the Chris Carraba wannabes have left the building. The reason? For one, the band has some killer musical chops and aren't afraid to use them to get its point across. And two, the songs are the right balance of Fugazi obliqueness and Cheap Trick power-pop. "A Cinema Spine" is sure to be a fist-in-the-air anthem at the band's live shows and "Jaws Of Life" is a tune that may just make the ladies cry. Hey, we all need a good cry now and then, don't we? Before Braille Jason Kundrath, CMJ If California's Vagrant lays claim to the finest roster of hook-laden emo-core and D.C.'s Dischord has a stronghold on the cutting edge of angular post-hardcore, it kinda makes sense that the two sounds would meet somewhere in the middle on Arizona's Aezra label, where a band called Before Braille brews its own unique blend of rock for the new millennium. Seething with salt, sweat , honey and asphalt (not unlike seasoned AZ contemporaries Jimmy Eat World), this foursome delivers a positively commanding performance that betrays its relatively recent appearance on the radar. Each track on this sampler of songs from the upcoming full-length is brimming with texture and taste. Like Get Up Kids without the sentimentality or Fugazi with an eye toward the mainstream, Before Braille deftly delivers the best elements of both sonic camps. In one convenient package, you get not only a highly melodic, pop sensibility but also a challenging rhythmic stutter that keeps the whole affair from ever getting stale.