Dashboard Confessional

Dashboard Confessional
Dashboard Confessional is a band, but it's easy to use the name to cover the cult of personality of just one man: singer/songwriter Chris Carrabba. Taking cues from the more confessional and personal vein of '90s indie punk, known somewhat derisively as "emo," Carrabba turned the idea into a one-man cottage industry of sad-boy folk-punk numbers. His debut, The Swiss Army Romance, is an intimate, almost claustrophobically tight album. The odd background vocal disrupts Carrabba's reverie, but it's almost exclusively his therapy session. Clearly, Carrabba's never met a woman he didn't alienate, or whom he wasn't alienated by, or both. "You're dying to look cute in your blue jeans," he gripes on the title track, "but you're plastic just like everyone/You're just like everyone." And so it goes. Carrabba sings with a piercingly clear whine, infecting all his ramblings with an accent of desperation, whether it's getting overwhelmed by the detritus of love lost ("Living in Your Letters") or driving home, stewing in his own pain ("The Sharp Hint of New Tears").
With the addition of Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Dan Bonebrake to the lineup, Dashboard Confessional sounded more powerful on its second album, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most. And thanks to the breakout single "Screaming Infidelities" (reworked from the debut), people outside the band's dedicated, Internet-centric emo fan base were able to channel Carrabba. What they found was even more fatal femmes -- women who lie, cheat, and run away without explaining why. On "The Good Fight," "The Best Deceptions," and "Saints and Sailors," Carrabba bleeds anguish, creating some of the most plainspoken and effective music for catharsis in recent memory.