The Nevada Sagebrush

Dashboard Confessional, advocate of teen angst and defenders of the right to cry in a dark corner, released its sixth studio album, Alter the Ending, last week, giving misunderstood adolescents a reason to rejoice.

Dashboard Confessional’s sixth album Alter The Ending strays in a new direction while still offering a sense of familiarity for longtime fans. Photo courtesy of Dashboard Confessional.

Chris Carrabba returns to the microphone with a voice known to make 14-year-old girls dissolve into tears, belting out 12 emo anthems that sound like a happy medium between its earlier, peppier albums and the mellow sounds of the band’s last studio album, In the Shade of Poison Trees.

The album gets off to a rocky start with the first track, “Get Me Right,” a three-minute train  wreck of repetitive sub-par lyrics and an 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 album’s pace and is 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 “Let’s run away together” song is one of the longer ones on the album, but unlike the first track, isn’t painful to listen to.

The title song of the album, “Alter the Ending,” is by far the best 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, the vocals and overall catchy tune definitely put it in the running to go on the “Top 25 Most Played” list on my iTunes.

Another candidate for overplaying 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 such as nerves and frontal lobes, with the repeated line, “This is chemical.” Though it’s different from the band’s usual style, it’s a lot of fun.

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 the band has been associated with from the beginning, it adds a side of upbeat and fun tracks that redeem the album from being a total and absolute emo mess.

Dashboard Confessional

Alter the Ending

Release Date: Nov. 10

Genre: Alternative, Indie rock

Grade: C+

Jerri Cuerden can be reached at arts-entertainment@nevadasagebrush.com.

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