I can’t stand most Emo music, but one of the exceptions to that statement is the group Dashboard Confessional. Dashboard gained their notoriety with an Unplugged performance that featured the crowd poignantly singing along to every song. What makes Dashboard stand out is Chris Carrabba’s ability to write what I call Seinfeld style love songs. The show Seinfeld was all about the observations on the minutia of daily life, and Dashboard Confessional is all about the little moments that we all experience in love and lust like trying to decide what shirt to wear on a first date with a girl you met in class and amplifying them; making those type of small situations feel as important as the publication of Thomas Payne’s Common Sense.

            While Dashboard Confessional Unplugged will always be their definitive album, Dusk and Summer is their second best album to date and the album where there switch from acoustic rock to full fledged arena ready band becomes complete. Nearly every single Dashboard song has been about love/relationships and Dusk and Summer is the same with one exception, the song Slow Decay. The song is about a soldier just home from Iraq trying to come to grips with normal American life after watching his friend die in the war and killing nameless enemies. The soldier receives compliments from his dad “you look so strong / in that picture on the mantle/ you sent your mom when you where gone.” But the returning soldier cant deal with the guilt he is feeling because he  let his friend down or from all the lives he took amidst living in the vagarious of his life back home; “I am here alive/ with satellites/ and Friday nights/ and no one to judge me/ or the things that I have done at all.” For a group that usually goes the love song route, it is a pretty powerful song and takes a different angle then most songs about the war.

            Now on to what the Dashboard fans all really want to hear, do the love songs pack the punch of classics like Hands Down and Screaming Infidelities? For the most part they do. Reason To Believe and Heaven Here rehash lines too similar to previous song i.e. My heart is sturdy, but it needs you to survive.” The album is a borderline concept album with the overarching theme of summer love. Indeed the album has enough classic songs about summer lovin to keep John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John singing for weeks. The song Currents makes a great metaphor between the rising/falling tide and a relationship. Stolen is about that last weekend before the end of summer when everyone will return go back to high school or college; “before the gold and the glimmer have been replaced/ another sun soaked season fades away.”

            By far the best song on the album and the best song about looking back on summer love since Don Henley’s Boys of Summer is So Long So Long. The song features haunting background vocals from Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz as he and Carrabba sing “how the girls can turn to ghost before your eyes.”  Well, being that it is summer and it shaping up to be a nice day, I am going for a summer bike ride on memorial drive; so I will end my review with the final lines from So Long So Long.

“ and I will leave under the cover/ of summer’s kiss upon the sky/ like the cold face of your love / just before she says goodbye / I was certain that the season/ could be held between my arms/ well just as summer’s hold is fleeting/ I was here but now I am gone/ I am gone / so long so long.