Cutting across the musical horizon in a perfect parabola, emo music has now bottlerocketed through its entire course, mirroring the vaportrails of shoegazer, funk-metal, brit-pop, and pop-punk. The second wave of emo, ignited by Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary LP, enjoyed a fiery ascent capped with a colorful boom, showering sparks that have since faded. Emo has continued its course down the spiral, leaving us only with afterthoughts and repurcussions. Some have turned their heads away as the emo firecracker coughs out nameless LPs and seven- inches by faceless bands capped with Romulan haircuts and wrapped in tight tees. But look now! Quick! A dying moment of grace! As emo splashes down into the sea of musical history, Mineral's End Serenading emits!

The band's posthumous second album is an perfect 10 entry-- tight, small splash, beautiful in form, like Greg Luganis. Ripples wake radially. Who knows, with a swan song like this, emo's wake just might have enough energy to influence new systems. The entropy still flows.

True masters of their art, it took only two albums for Mineral to figure out how emo needed to be done. The distortion and noise bursts of their 1997 debut, The Power of Failing, are replaced with clockwork guitar pickings. Melodies and percussion click like archaic typewriters spewing long-distance love letters. Lyrically Hallmark, but offered with quivering intensity, Mineral's songs ambiguously quaver between powerful and delicate.

Intensely intricate with complex instrumental intercourse, End Serenading clenches you by the throat and french kisses you. It's an absolute must- have for emo scenesters, and a genre bastion for the curious. And don't say I didn't tell you so when they show up later in music history.

-Brent DiCrescenzo

"Unfinished"