Review: Dashboard Confessional – Alter The Ending

November 11th, 2009 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Dashboard Confessional - After The Ending Chris Carrabba, returning as Dashboard Confessional after the relative flop of 2007′s The Shade Of Poison Trees, faces an uphill battle: the painfully earnest sincerity of his best work no longer has cachet in a pop culture landscape where the shit-eating grin of fake self-parody is hot currency, his once loyal fanbase has grown up and (hopefully) moved on to subtler and smarter art, and the inexorable march of time has made his fixation on prom night themes undeniably comical. After contemplating these factors, he has elected not to throw in the towel but, instead, to release an album featuring forty-two minutes of material with the songcraft level (if not the maturity) of your average Taylor Swift single.

Alter The Ending is truly a wonder to behold. As in, how did this record ever get made? Who paid for the studio time? Did Carrabba actually believe these songs were worthy of being immortalized on a tiny plastic disc? I don’t mean to doubt his intentions, and he does have a history of being not terribly self-aware, but this is really pushing it. The deluxe version of the record comes with a bonus acoustic edition of the album; I recommend you spring for that, if you’re really interested, because the full studio version has been mixed to sound like a long lost Rick Springfield record.

The disc actually starts promisingly with “Get Me Right” – the central riff is sharp and Carrabba does interesting things with his voice, twisting around on the hook and really selling it. But once that’s over, Alter The Ending devolves into the aural equivalent of a Full House episode. Where Carrabba once captivated with well-observed details and the sheer perversity of his obsessive streak, he now deals in bland generalities. I don’t want to say that the guy is being dishonest or calculating in his efforts to chronicle standard teen heartbreak in the most generic way possible, but I will say that this joke is way, way better on the new Weezer album.

There are some bright spots: the title track provides genuine uplift with its showroom riffs and surging chorus, and album-ender “Hell On The Throat” is refreshingly underdone (although I could do without the big, ponderous piano notes). But mostly it’s crap like “Everybody Learns From Disaster,” where the disaster in question appears to be some harsh sunburn (seriously) and the central lesson is so head-poundingly “Duh!” that Carrabba’s every utterance of it becomes insulting. Is this supposed to be music for grown-ups, or what?

As somebody that has enjoyed Dashboard Confessional in the past, I hoped that I might continue to for some time in the future. But I can’t endorse Alter The Ending any more that I can tolerate listening to it one more time; this is the worst kind of pandering treacle. There is absolutely no reason for Chris Carrabba to continue in this vein, as he’s lost the ability to provide memorable tunes and, more importantly, genuine insight. Maybe a few people will enjoy this, but I really doubt it.