Heave Media

We find no comfort underneath this tree.

Carrabba grows older as his lyrics continue down the same heartbroken path.

Dashboard Confessional

The Shade of Poison Trees

Released on Nov 30, -0001

It’s quite the understatement to say that Dashboard Confessional is a divisive entity; for a band that listeners love, hate and really love to hate - the middle ground fluctuates like a California landslide. Chris Carrabba’s “oh-god-my-soul –is-collapsing-in-on-itself? style lyrics simultaneously unite fans in one monumental, emotive sigh, and annoy the hell out of detractors who can’t quite get on board with his simple cycles of heartbreak and hope.

Last year’s Dusk and Summer can best be described as an attempt to forego their either/or identity. With a full band, Carrabba wrote big, lush songs and tried to scale them to producer Daniel Lanois’ love for epic sounds. The problem? Well, first and foremost, the album was boring. Loose melodies, inept lyrics and a lack of any sense of passion shackled the set from its opening chords. It takes a certain kind of personality and sincerity to write an entire album of mid-tempo, romantic ballads without sounding completely pretentious. (Or, in the case of U2, it takes a special personality to still be tolerable in spite of, or perhaps because of, such pretension). Dashboard may have been unbearable to some before the disc, but at least they were never uninteresting.

The Shade of Poison Trees finds Carrabba returning, in some ways, to the roots of what made him popular in the first place. Gone are the strings, mid-tempo guitars and the vacuous studio production. Gone, for the most part, is his touring band. What we’re left with (most of the time) is Carrabba and his guitar. Conceptually, this sounds like an attractive idea. But in execution the album suffers numerous problems, not the least of which is its lyrical content.

Though it was often Carrabba’s heart-on-his-sleeve lyrics that so many found intolerable, it’s undeniable that he had a way with words - no matter how juvenile a sentiment they were expressing. High-school seniors don’t sway back and forth in a crowded theater weeping into their virgin mixed drinks while chanting “your hair is everywhere, screaming infidelities, and taking its wear? for nothing. Fans connected with the Florida-based singer because he put his romantic lacerations in the spotlight, where others bask in them. On the new album, however, we’re left feeling like Carrabba has lost his ability to channel the inner 17 year-old. Instead, we get a morose 30-something who is somewhere between too old and too young.

In short, the album sounds exactly as it you might expect—like a man and band unwilling to embrace the identity that best fits them. Add a shortened running time, and the fact that Carrabba never really gets a chance to exercise his vocal cords to the mix and the outcome is sub-par, at best.

Here’s a small suggestion: Go back to what made A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar an incredible guilty pleasure: Big melodies, sing-along catharsis and a willingness to sing about things that you know will make a large amount of people detest you. For a band that is supposed to be sink or swim, nothing sounds worse than treading water.

Posted by Ryan Peters on Oct 03, 2007 @ 12:00 am