Copeland's Dressed Up & In Line is neither fish nor fowl, neither a new album nor the stopgap collection of rarities and outtakes it at first appears to be. Originally announced as a two-CD set but scaled back to a single disc just prior to release, Dressed Up & In Line gathers 15 songs from the length of the earnest Florida emo kids' career, from their first EP to outtakes from the previous year's Eat, Sleep, Repeat. Several are acoustic versions of fan favorites like "You Love to Sing" and "Careful Now." Two others are needless covers of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and the Police's "Every Breath You Take," the former adding nothing to the unimpeachable original, and the latter bad enough that it somehow makes even the original song sound worse than it used to. The others are DJ remixes, B-sides, and outtakes. What's unusual about this album is that rather than merely gathering the odds and ends onto a CD-R and calling that the master, singer Aaron Marsh and cohorts went back and remixed and selectively re-recorded most of the songs; according to Marsh's long, chatty liner notes, some were basically thrown out and redone anew. The results have an admirable sonic consistency, at least -- a casual fan might not even recognize at first that this was a compilation and not a new album -- but the uneven quality of the songs themselves makes Dressed Up & In Line more of a curiosity for the devoted than a truly necessary release. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide
