Generally speaking, healthy quotients of singer/songwriters have a reputation as being highly sensitive but emotionally tattered people.
The good ones have rummaged through the unavoidable muck of the world to present a clearer, though not always brighter, version of it, coupled with mature and enigmatic melodies. The mediocre version of this ilk, however, fall somewhat short of the bar.
In this respect, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, the sophomore effort of Dashboard Confessional - also known as Christopher Carrabba - comes to mind.
Rooted firmly in a montage of punk-pop sound, the album is the long chronicle of one dysfunctional relationship after another - with Carrabba constantly playing the devoted lover whose heart is trampled by his partner's relentless taste for infidelity and lies.
On track two, "Screaming Infidelities," Carrabba sings, with the same acoustic guitar that resonates throughout the album, about his girlfriend's botched attempts to hide her sexual wanderings.
His voice is delicate and effective in heightening the drama of each note, but lyrically Carrabba needs some maturation.
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"As for now I'm going to hear the saddest songs and sit alone and wonder" is a nice line, but it is followed a couple lines later with "I wish that I was anywhere, with anyone, making out." Making out?
With that line, the agony that Carrabba seems to portray through the song suddenly becomes insignificant and helplessly juvenile.
Carrabba should have the sensibility to at least match the overwhelming confessional nature of his songs with a palpable and acute brand of sexual frustration. Instead we are left with the emotions we felt in the eighth grade.
"The Best Deceptions" is a good song with a powerful and lucid guitar strum, while the line, "Kiss me hard 'cause this will be the last time that I'll let you," is a revealing statement about the power gained from finally overcoming the bondage of an unhealthy passion.
Other songs, however, fail to stir any response other than boredom.
"Saints and Sailors," with its trite pop melody, seems like a muddled attempt to capture the sound of the Goo Goo Dolls, while "Standard Lines" could be on the soundtrack for the next Freddie Prinze Jr. movie.
If anything, Carrabba needs a lesson in vocal restraint. His voice can be subtle, mapping out the inner crevices of dissolution, but then can shift rapidly into hyperbole - distancing the listener from a supposedly visceral experience. Thus at the end of the album, no new insights into the inner-workings of relationships are given and we are left at the same place where we began - a broken heart, anger and a decent album struggling with hollow profundities.
