Forever got longer—two albums longer

Braid means many things to many people, but before I listened to their posthumous, career-spanning double CD worth of seven-inch singles and split seven-inch singles, they never really meant much to me. And after spending two weeks listening to Movie Music, I must say that they still have about the same impact—none. I'm just not impressed with this "monster" (as frontman Bob Nanna calls it in his unduly cocky liner notes). In fact, I see the monster as made of nothing but the egotistical desire to put out tons of better-uncollected material to underscore just how important they were in the years between 1993 and 1999. The problem, however, is that the collection wants too much to pretend that the movie they have soundtracked is not only about how Braid began, climaxed, and eventually fell apart, but by extension, can be applied to the "scene" as well. (Keep in mind that they have released just as much posthumous material as bands infinitely superior to them, such as the Pixies.)

It's true that these songs sound like generic emo because Braid was right there when it all began. It's also true that Braid is better at sounding like itself than any bands who try to sound like them. Maybe they should get points for not taking themselves too seriously, not getting all weepy and well, emotional, like some bands I could name, and for putting out mainly rockin', hard-driving songs that will have you singing along. Nanna quotes a reviewer who once asked why Braid always put all their good songs on compilations instead of on their albums. He writes, "What this reviewer didn't know is that, apart from the covers, we never specifically wrote a song to be used on a single or compilation. In the back of our minds we all knew that Movie Music was going to happen as documentation." Thus, all the songs are presented in the order they were recorded, not released, so that you can trace their evolution.

Braid wants badly to convince you that they're seminal, serious, and fun-lovin' boys from Illinois, all at the same time. But most of the songs on the double album never manage to transcend the popped-up version of math-rock that Braid got famous for peddling. The few good songs on Volume 1 ("Forever Got Shorter," "(Strawberry Ann) Switzerland," "Please Drive Faster") certainly don't justify the meticulous collection of the rest of the volume. And neither does Volume 2, with its badly mangled covers (the boys take on the Smiths, the Pixies, Billy Joel, and Burt Bacharach) just in case we don't get that they're insouciant and a bundle of fun to boot. "The time has long since passed but the spirit is still there and it warms me every time I listen. We were kids having fun and I hope it shows," Bob Nanna writes in the liner notes to Volume 2. By this time, we're sick of his ego and his band's smiley mediocrity. "Even the mistakes sound good to me," he writes elsewhere.

The recording quality on most of these songs is pretty dismal compared to the albums. Incongruously, the price is pretty steep ($30 for the two CDs). Unless you're a hardcore fan who wants every single unnecessary time change, melodramatic noodling session, puerile homonym-reliant pun, and egotistic spasm of Bob Nanna's at your digital service forever, your money would be better spent buying some beers to celebrate the band's breakup. (Polyvinyl)

—Bidisha Banerjee

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