In the summer of 2005, my high school band played a show in a dude’s parents’ garage (that dude is now a member of the excellent band JAGALCHI). In between bands, a song was playing that gave the same sort of frantic post-hardcore as At the Drive-In. I was transfixed and asked what it was. The answer was a band called …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. A couple years later, I stumbled upon their album Source Tages & Codes in the used CD section of my local record store. I bought it without hesitation.

But as I listened to it, I found it a bit too scattered to get my head around it. There were moments of the chaotic bliss that grabbed my attention, but they were brief and rare among a bevy of anthemic emo songs, theatrical prog, and, to my dismay (then) power pop songs.

With the space of two decades between my first impression and finding it for free on The Sound of Vinyl’s Father’s Day sale, I’ve realized that what I initially saw as scatterbrained is actually sprawling, offering a snapshot of the early 2000s alt scene that includes bits of every subgenre’s tendencies.

If you were to draw a map of every comparison to contemporary bands, it would end up looking like the red-threaded wall of a conspiracy nut’s basement. There are bits of At the Drive-In, as mentioned (“Homage,” though it was intended as an ode to Unwound), but that’s just an accent color. The record is a melting pot of Coheed’s proggy sequencing, with samples linking many of the tracks, Thursday-ish spiraling guitar lines (“How Near, How Far“), Get-Up Kids-esque powerpop (“Baudelaire“), angular Jawboxy guitar work (“Another Morning Stoner“) Hot Water Music’s shouty hardcore (“Days of Being Wild“), Strokes-y 60s rock reappropriation (“Monsoon“), shades of alt-country via Dinosaur Jr, (“Source Tags & Codes“), and just about any other trend you can think of at the time. I also defy anyone to find an album opener as electrifying as “It was There That I Saw You.”

Could that sound scattered? Sure. But the group has a way of linking these sonic snippets together in a way that seems more like a collage than a scrapbook. It’s important to remember that Trail of Dead were contemporaries to most of these acts, so any similarities are more a sign of what was in the water than intentional derivation. You can draw these similarities, but this record sounds like no one but …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. They are mercurial and chameleonic, but they are wholly themselves. Twenty years after its release, I’m not sure there’s a single record that does more to encapsulate what the early 2000s punk, emo, and hardcore scene sounded like in a single package.