Dashboard Confessional: Alter The Ending

My review for this week. Should be published next Tuesday!

Dashboard Confessional, advocates of teen angst and defenders of the right to cry in a dark corner released their sixth studio album, Alter the Ending last week, giving misunderstood adolescents everywhere reason to rejoice.
Chris Carrabba returns to the mic with his voice that has been known known to make 14 year old girls dissolve to tears belting out 12 emo anthems that sound like a happy medium of their earlier, peppier albums, and the mellow sounds of their last studio album, In the Shade of Poison Trees.
The album gets off to a rocky start with the first track, Get Me Right which was a three minute and sixteen second train wreck of repetitive subpar lyrics with an almost irritating verse tune. Overall, the song sounds less like the work of well seasoned professionals, and more like something one would expect from a garage band at a frat party.
Until Morning picked up the pace a bit and was more reminiscent of Dashboard’s earlier work on A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar. Overall though, I felt that track three, Everybody Learns from Disaster marked a definite upswing in the album as a whole. This stereotypical ‘runaway together’ song is one of the longer ones on the album, but unlike the first track, isn’t almost painful to listen to in its entirety.
The title song of the album, Alter the Ending is by far my favorite track. The song mixes a lot of the old Dashboard signatures, such as simple but memorable guitar parts, and the almost impossible high notes of Carrabba’s vocals. While the familiarity of the music makes this song worth listening to, I think the vocals and overall catchy tune definitely put it in the running to go on the “Top 25 most played” list of my iTunes.
Another candidate for overplaying on my personal playlists is The Motions. This song adds a surprising new sound to the album, with its light electric vibe. The song’s lyrics are quirky, mostly consisting of scientific terms of nerves and frontal lobes, with the repeated line “This is chemical.”
Overall, Alter the Ending is pretty much what could have been expected from a Dashboard Confessional album, standing up to the stereotypical emo sound that they have been associated with from the beginning, with a side of upbeat and fun.
You can find Alter the Ending in stores now.