20th anniversary review: Dashboard Confessional – “The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most”

This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

Vagrant Records – 20 March, 2001

Well, as for now I’m gonna hear the saddest songs (a little differently)

Dashboard Confessional, effectively Chris Carrabba, set the scene for his meteoric rise as emo troubadour with Swiss Army Romance but it was the Vagrant Records release of The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most on this day in 2001 that took the Floridian from side stage opening act to headlining festival main stages.  The album turned the punk/indie scene on its ear and led hundreds of hardcore kids to tattoo hearts on their sleeves and pick up an acoustic.

March of 2001, I was a pretentious 19 year old scene gatekeeper who hated the word emo being used on the current batch because it was insulting to the Rites of Spring/Embrace albums who originated the word (as far as I cared to know at the time at least). When Dashboard Confessional’s “Screaming Infidelities” blew up I was immediately disgusted. I mean why were the hardcore and pop-punk kids I was surrounding myself getting so turned on by this clown weeping over an acoustic guitar? 20 years ago I would shoehorn Chris Carrabba into any music discussion I could just to insult him and weed out his fans from my social circle. It was fine if they were into Carrabba’s roots in The Vacant Andy’s and I’d give them a weary pass when it came to Further Seems Forever but this Dashboard nonsense was unacceptable and I didn’t need that kind of crybaby in my life.

Now I’m creeping up on 40 as The Places You Have Come to Fear The Most turns 20 so I figured I’d give it another shot. I mean I’m a different person now. I get excited for car rides with my daughters so I can gleefully sing along while Taylor Swift weeps over her guitar. (I’ve said it before and I will say it again… Folklore is a perfect album; start to finish). 

I was pleasantly surprised to say Places is not what I remember it being. To be clear, it is still shitty middle school poetry bawled by a grown man and I still dislike it but it hits differently in the current climate.

While I still think that lyrically Carrabba is emotionally stunted, the musicianship when fleshed out by keys, drums and a bass is impressively nuanced. The melodies have grown on me over the decades. There is a comfort in the emotional detachment in his lyrics as he sings about romance and endings he seems never to have experienced. Lyrically he is the scene equivalent of a Saved By The Bell episode. He hits all the notes but the cheese and melodrama undermine the sincerity.

But here’s the thing… In 2001, we had just finished up the polarizing bubble gum of Britney Spears, and the ignorant aggression of Limp Bizkit… Dashboard Confessional was aggressively bubblegum.  Carrabba’s boyish good looks and perfectly gelled baby-pomp combined with his full sleeve tattoos were able to bridge a gap between those young people who had begun to mature beyond TRL but hadn’t yet found a way to find independent music.  Carraba was the middle ground where heartbreak could be fun, and where relationships could end in cold and violent outbursts.  Looking back there is a chance that I was so angry at the trees that I missed the forest entirely.

“The Brilliant Dance” sets the scene for The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most, opening the LP moments after a breakup with Carrabba struggling past the thoughts that “nobody cares at all.”  More importantly though, instead of channeling rage toward the heartbreaker, we learn that the singer has put his hand through the wall.  At a time when it wasn’t uncommon for breakup songs to center around misogynistic name-calling and violent fantasies of causing physical pain to the one who caused your emotional anguish, Carrabba hurts himself and wallows passively in his own torment.  That is the lyrical theme throughout the album, Dashboard Confessional writes immature but honorable lyrics and takes all the bad upon himself and rarely dishes any out on his partner.

I say rarely because there are moments of blame, as the title of lead single “Scremaing Infidelities” might infer.  Even here, where he contemplates how his ex is being open about moving on, he doesn’t blame.  He longs for her return, obsessing about letters signed with love, their smell in his bed and struggling to escape the ghosts of the relationship.  Following it up with the literal kiss off in “The Best Deceptions,” may feature the most direct aggression on the album, and even that really totals up to simply screening calls to protect himself from drawn out goodbyes.  

The album continues to fumble through the hokey imaginings of breakups with that same focus on introspection as Carrabba laments about the passion behind an argument being better than the loneliness on ”Saints and Sailors.” The remainder of the album sees Dashboard alternate between soft falsettos and emotive crescendos.  The juxtaposition of soft to loud is most prevalent as the album closes out, from the female vocals to the structure of the guitar subtly filling the room, the title track projects the rawness of Carrabba’s heartbreak.  Real or imagined the vocal abrasiveness seems the most sincere of the album and is a perfect segue to the dissonance and pain in Carrabba’s voice as he closes out the album with the strained and loud whispers of “The Bitter Pill”

In understanding the peripheral circumstances to the popularity of The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most, I noticed something that went completely unnoticed at the time but is jarringly obvious looking back.  In a time when Jesse Lacey was wishing his exes contract an STD and being disappointed when they survive plane crashes, Dashboard brought a serenity to his heartbreak.  Sure, it seemed immature and insincere at the time, but holy shit, I wish I spent more time cuddling in blankets and sheets, listening to the saddest songs and less time following the misogynistic leads of so many of Carrabba’s contemporaries.

Maybe the album itself isn’t something I will enjoy, not then, not now and probably not ever but I have to give the album and the man credit for the way the music and content holds up. The lyrics, the musicianship and the content has not changed or soured in 20 years, which is a true testament to the value of Carrabba’s emotional detachment.  Whereas so many albums from the early-00s have grown in cringe in light of the lyrical content or the subtext that comes with a shifting mindset, Dashboard seems as sterile and innocuous now as then.  The same inoffensive banality that caused my immature disrespect has come to earn my admiration 20 years too late.