Saosin (Event Over)

Southern California quintet Saosin are one of the fastest-growing headliners in rock – earning mainstage slots on the Vans Warped Tour, selling out clubs in a flash, going out with heavyweights like AFI, Avenged Sevenfold, My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday and garnering an ocean of fans who’ve downloaded their songs from MySpace over five million times – all before they’ve released a full-length album.

That will all change on September 26th with the Capitol Records release of their self-titled debut. As your average Saosin fan (and there are legions) will be quick to point out, the wait was a considerable one. “We were waiting until the songs were right,” says frontman Cove Reber with some understatement.

It’s been three years since word of the band’s full-length debut first surfaced, and in that time a lot has changed within the music scene from which they originally emerged and within the band itself.

Seemingly overnight, stylized bands playing strains of melodic post-hardcore have sailed up the pop charts. But for Saosin -- Reber, bassist Chris Sorenson, drummer Alex Rodriguez, and guitarists Beau Burchell and Justin Shekoski -- things have played out a bit differently. During the scene’s ascension, the band’s members have all but shunned the idea of a genre tag or an “image” -- unless, of course, you count the jeans and t-shirts they soak in sweat every night onstage -- and have instead focused their energies on making an album that will live or die strictly on musical merits.

But the band’s sound and its ambition grew tremendously during the recording of their 12-song debut, an album that exceeds even the wildest of expectations. From the dueling guitar crunch of opener “It’s Far Better to Learn” to the nosebleed anthemic heights of lead single “Voices,” the livewire maelstrom of “Follow and Feel” and epic heartstring-puller “You’re Not Alone,” Saosin have created the kind of debut album that announces something indisputably new under rock’s sun.