Boston trio began incorporating new ideas into their intricately constructed post-hardcore style on their third album, 1998's . Starting there, the band began weaving complex jazz guitar soloing and more advanced compositional ideas into their slow-paced, introspective emo rock, landing on a sound not explored by too many of their peers. collects 's output from the time of their 2000 album to their initial breakup in 2005 after releasing their final album, , the year before. It's a definitive look at the phase when the group all but extracted any hints of punk from their sound, leaning instead into straightforward jazz structures and chord progressions on tunes like 's "The Lived-But-Yet-Named," experiments with space and formlessness on tracks like "South" in 2002, and even extended improvisations and experiments with sound processing on the lengthy tracks from their 2001 EP . Instead of just assimilating these musical ideas, truly built on them, with singer/guitarist/songwriter 's pensive vocals and sometimes abstract, sometimes emotionally bare songwriting always at the core of even the band's most stylistically unmoored songs. , , and , and also includes previously unreleased rehearsal tapes from around the time of . The extremely lo-fi rehearsal recordings are perhaps the most telling artifact of the entire collection, capturing the band in a moment of uninhibited jamming and giving a sense of how far out their ideas could get before being reined back in during the recording process. Absorbing the entirety of 's second phase presented here (relegating to more of a transitional document) illuminates just how far outside the indie rock trends of their day the band was. ~ Fred Thomas