Chris Carrabba’s lyrics loom over today’s pop like a baffling relic of teendom. Taylor Swift, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, and Kacey Musgraves can sing some of these pained words by heart, but so can scrappy emo revivalists and maudlin rap-rockers. If you’ve been a teenager at any point in the 21st century, then perhaps you can too.
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. Carrabba’s debut, 2000’s The Swiss Army Romance stands as an incredible pop document, like emo lightning in a singer-songwriter bottle. 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. 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. He wasn’t the first bandleader to unplug, but he made an artistic identity out of it.
Young audiences recognized themselves in these diaristic songs of naïve longing. 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. 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. There was a tension between Dashboard’s austere origins and the full-band gloss needed for a stretch of three gold albums released between 2001 and 2006. 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. 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.
Dashboard’s recordings since those early years have oscillated between mega-produced albums for a mass audience and stripped-down sets for fans. 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. With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place. It’s possible to balance intimacy and accessibility, but it’s not easy, and too often here we end up with only the latter. 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. “We got the radio pumping jams,” Carrabba sings in a rasp, like he’s lifting something heavy.
Reassurance is a theme of the album and the opener “We Fight,” about defending a fiercely inclusive local music scene, is a highlight. There’s real urgency in Carrabba’s delivery, as the arrangement swells from Death Cab for Cutie-ish introspection to full-throated righteousness. 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.
But the thing that really connects these nine songs on this disparate, scattershot album together is that every song is generally disappointing. “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. “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. Crooked Shadows’ finale “Just What to Say,” with stately guest vocals by Chrissy Costanza of labelmates Against the Current, describers all the symptoms of writer’s block, and the rest of the record certainly exhibits them.
Did you know that, several years ago, Carrabba formed a Mumford-style stomp-and-clap folk-pop band? He did. And that’s most evident on the stark strummer “Heart Beat Here,” which resembles early Dashboard on bluegrass. He’s still melodramatic, letting us picture a married couple connecting despite time they’re forced to spend apart, but he has only clumsy things to sing about feeling a pulse. “Be Alright” is built more on smoldering U2-style arena rock, but it too has one of those “oh-oh-oh” jamboree hooks. And if “we ain’t the kind to play it safe,” as he claims on the song, why is this reassurance so stultifyingly bland?
Dashboard being Dashboard, Carrabba offers romantic comfort, too. On “Open My Eyes,” with melodramatic violin from YouTube star Lindsey Stirling, Carrabba begs for an epiphany amid a relationship that’s grown “from dancing and turning/to pacing and worrying.” It’s relatable the way Dashboard once could be, but also a tad generic. The title track, with hints of the prickly guitars from Paramore’s 2017 alt-pop balm “Hard Times,” resolves the tense moments that happen between two otherwise-loving adults with a silhouetted image. The female partner in his songs still isn’t a three-dimensional character, but at least she more closely resembles one.
The other night, while getting ready for dinner, I inadvertently started singing the title track of Dashboard’s 2001 So Impossible EP. My wife, who knew the song from a mix I’d made for her back when it was fairly new, weighed in, sounding more exasperated than annoyed: “I thought we were done with this.” She wasn’t wrong. Like so much else in our past lives, the impact these words once had on me was gone, replaced with the bittersweet tang of nostalgia. I stopped singing immediately. Carrabba doesn’t have the same luxury.
