“About Us” is by-the-numbers keyboard pomp, with shades of fun., the Killers, or any other fine purveyor of “wanna hold you a little bit tighter/burn like a lighter” power ballads. “Catch You” is synth-streaked new-wave pop a la the Cars, with Carrabba oddly asserting that he’s “no angel” but, given that “it’s a long way up to fall all the way down,” he’ll still swoop to your rescue. Ironic detachment won’t help the kid “who’s tired of bleeding, and battered, and being torn up,” Carrabba demonstrates, but hollering along with kindred spirits just might.īut the thing that really connects these nine songs on this disparate, scattershot album together is that every song is generally disappointing. There’s real urgency in Carrabba’s delivery, as the arrangement swells from Death Cab for Cutie-ish introspection to full-throated righteousness. Reassurance is a theme of the album and the opener “We Fight,” about defending a fiercely inclusive local music scene, is a highlight. “We got the radio pumping jams,” Carrabba sings in a rasp, like he’s lifting something heavy. The most egregious example is road-trip anthem “Belong,” a corporate-synergy collaboration with DJ group Cash Cash that brings to mind the Chainsmokers producing Owl City. It’s possible to balance intimacy and accessibility, but it’s not easy, and too often here we end up with only the latter. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place. With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. He’d retreat into the studio with big-name producers like Daniel Lanois or Tony Visconti, and then turn around and sell a tour-only album of acoustic covers. Worse was the male-centric solipsism, brimming with angst toward a largely undifferentiated female “you,” that rightly led to feminist reevaluations of how emo could often be sexist.ĭashboard’s recordings since those early years have oscillated between mega-produced albums for a mass audience and stripped-down sets for fans. It’s also harder to take Dashboard’s post-adolescent pining with a straight face once you reach the age-from mid-20s to early-30s-that Carrabba actually was during that charmed run. There was a tension between Dashboard’s austere origins and the full-band gloss needed for a stretch of three gold albums released between 20. But Crooked Shadows, Dashboard’s seventh album, is also a chance to acknowledge the reasons it sometimes seems better to let those lyrics lie dormant in the cultural subconscious. Carrabba knew how to wring maximum stomach butterflies out of small but commonplace details, and he left enough space for us to find our own voices in those strums and yelps. Young audiences recognized themselves in these diaristic songs of naïve longing. He wasn’t the first bandleader to unplug, but he made an artistic identity out of it. It was released in a small run on a South Florida label near where Carrabba grew up, just as the internet was reshaping how music could spread. The impression I had back then, in my own late teens, was of a tender-hearted misfit, shouting out his innermost feelings over not much more than acoustic guitar. Carrabba’s debut, 2000’s The Swiss Army Romance stands as an incredible pop document, like emo lightning in a singer-songwriter bottle. The release of the first Dashboard Confessional album in more than eight years is an opportunity to revisit the reasons why so many young music lovers learned his piercing, sentimental lines in the first place.
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