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When emo wasn't a trend yet, when there weren't suicidal teenagers with fringes hooked on My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, when emo still had dignity, there were bands like Christie Front Drive.
And there was their first LP, "Stereo" (the second one would actually be a collection of tracks taken from various splits and EPs), which in just ten songs manages to entirely summarize the so-called "Midwest emo." The album opens with "Saturday", a song where for the first minute the same delicate arpeggio is repeated, then evolves into an increasingly intense emotional crescendo, with that "Don't fall down" repeated at the end several times... truly fantastic. The tracks follow one after another, and you'll feel completely detached from the world around you, being carried away by the incredible emotions that Christie Front Drive convey... only ten songs, which are actually seven, but that are enough to fully reflect human emotions...
Describing their music more objectively, sweet parts alternate with more "hard" ones, with catchy riffs almost leaning towards pop, rather light percussion, and vocals alternating between whispers and higher notes, but with an almost total absence of the screaming typical of emocore. The music is certainly inspired by that of Sunny Day Real Estate, but on the other hand, there are hundreds of bands that have heavily plundered the ideas of Jeremy Enigk and company... and there are far worse ones than Christie Front Drive. All things considered, in my opinion, a band that did not receive a tenth of the success it deserved, and that had a very short life, like many other bands similar to them... but perhaps it's better this way, since the bands that lasted longer then made at least mediocre albums (see "The Rising Tide" by Sunny Day Real Estate or Wood/Water by Promise Ring...), perhaps it's better that, like Mineral or Texas Is The Reason, they ended early but on a high note. When emo wasn't a trend yet.
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