That simplicity offers its own substantial rewards is the premise upon which The End Of America have built their debut album, Steep Bay. Three musicians sick of the road and modern life, the band decamped to a cabin in the Adirondack Mountains and used a battery-powered recorder to capture the mellow folk jams they wrote there. The result is twenty minutes of fairly pretty, but ultimately inconsequential, mood music that would be a lot more impressive if so many other good bands hadn’t gotten their first.

The majority of these nine tracks feel like Fleet Foxes’ first drafts, filled with delicate finger-picked guitar and smooth harmonizing. It’s not at all unpleasant, and far be it from me to discourage bands from stripping down the veneer and letting their songs breathe. It’s just that these songs are awfully slight – musically, they’re sketches, and it would take lyrics a good deal more insightful than what’s offered here to make them truly compelling.

Still, though: Steep Bay isn’t worthless. It’s a noble effort, and tracks like “Running” and “The Hardest Thing” offer refreshingly honest takes on growing up and attempting to engage with a confusing world. Going out into the wilderness and communing musically with nature was probably good for The End Of America, and they’ve created a solid foundation for future releases to build upon. Steep Bay, for all it’s good intentions, just isn’t captivating enough to make listeners ignore the underlying lack of real substance.

The End Of America:

• Bandcamp
• Facebook
• Reverb Nation

Calling your band Mixtapes is kind of ballsy. Mixtape culture is huge in an era when all the music nerds in the world are connected by fiber optic cable and sharing a virtual “mixtape” is as simple as clicking open a conversation on AIM. But this band has a certain mixtape-y vibe that makes their name appropriate and totally inoffensive; sometimes they sound like three bands duking it out for supremacy. And these battles occur in the space of one-to-two minutes; Mixtapes’ debut full-length Maps crams ten songs into eighteen minutes, allowing their detractors at least the concession of brevity.

But I don’t think there will be many detractors: It’s well-nigh impossible to object to music this home-made and fun. The disc kicks off with choppy acoustic guitar and cocaine jokes but ramps up to a full-band chug, with complimentary male/female vocals resting on top; this track, “Sunrise,” lasts exactly one minute but is dynamic and just straight-up cool enough to sustain thrice that running time. But Mixtapes seem to have learned some valuable lessons from Guided By Voices, the undisputed titans of this epic-in-miniature style of songwriting. There’s significantly less filler here than any GBV record, though – that would be the band’s overriding punk influence, which keeps the music ebbing and flowing in tuneful bursts of hollering and heavy guitar. It’s a good formula because it doesn’t feel like a formula at all; Maps is as much of a sonically volatile listening experience as you could hope for from pure basement rock like this.

With only one song crossing the dreaded three minute mark (that would be closer “Sunsets,” which borders on tastefulness with it’s well-implemented acoustic instruments), Maps is expertly sloppy fun that never wears out its welcome. Mixtapes are a young band with some very clear ideas about what they’re doing; the hints of jagged Jawbox-style emo mixed into tracks like “Hope Springs Eternal” prove they’ve got a few tricks that haven’t been fully revealed yet, and clever lyrics like “The color of your shirt reminds me of your bed / I don’t mean that in a sexual way” hint at a brain behind all the charming noise. Maps is satisfying as a statement of essential purpose, but it still functions primarily as a teaser for all the awesome things a band like Mixtapes can (and, hopefully, will) do in the future. I’m pretty excited to see where they go next.

Mixtapes:

• MySpace
• LastFM
• Death To False Hope Records

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.