Name	Dashboard Confessional
Height
Naionality	American
Date of Birth	June 21, 1985
Place of Birth	Boca Raton, Florida, USA
Famous for

Dashboard Confessional is a band, but it's easy to use the name to cover the cult of personality of just one man: singer/songwriter Chris Carrabba. Taking cues from the more confessional and personal vein of '90s indie punk, known somewhat derisively as "emo," Carrabba turned the idea into a one-man cottage industry of sad-boy folk-punk numbers. His debut, The Swiss Army Romance, is an intimate, almost claustrophobically tight album. The odd background vocal disrupts Carrabba's reverie, but it's almost exclusively his therapy session. Clearly, Carrabba's never met a woman he didn't alienate, or whom he wasn't alienated by, or both. "You're dying to look cute in your blue jeans," he gripes on the title track, "but you're plastic just like everyone/You're just like everyone." And so it goes. Carrabba sings with a piercingly clear whine, infecting all his ramblings with an accent of desperation, whether it's getting overwhelmed by the detritus of love lost ("Living in Your Letters") or driving home, stewing in his own pain ("The Sharp Hint of New Tears").

With the addition of Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Dan Bonebrake to the lineup, Dashboard Confessional sounded more powerful on its second album, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most. And thanks to the breakout single "Screaming Infidelities" (reworked from the debut), people outside the band's dedicated, Internet-centric emo fan base were able to channel Carrabba. What they found was even more fatal femmes -- women who lie, cheat, and run away without explaining why. On "The Good Fight," "The Best Deceptions," and "Saints and Sailors," Carrabba bleeds anguish, creating some of the most plainspoken and effective music for catharsis in recent memory.

Dashboard Confessional's music is nothing short of fanatical in nature, so it's not surprising that the band has fostered an unusually fervent fan base of disaffected teens. Those acolytes came out in full force for Dashboard Confessional's taping of MTV's Unplugged, creating easily the most interactive session the program has ever seen. On the recording, a wailing Carrabba encourages the audience members to shout their pain along with him, and on many of the songs, they chant along so loudly that Carrabba steps away from the mike. Their hurt matters just as much as his.

The adoration of scores of lovelorn teens didn't guarantee major-label success for Carrabba, though. A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar, the first fruit of a strategic alliance between his label Vagrant and Interscope, traded his earlier albums' intimacy for radio-ready soundscapes. "Hands Down," which scored big on an earlier EP, sounds drowned in feedback here, as does much of the album. The quiet tunefulness that had been Carrabba's stock-in-trade was mostly gone, and while songs like "Carry This Picture" and "Ghost of a Good Thing" sport his trademark wordy-yet-effective melodies, they're not enough to keep the album afloat. (JON CARAMANICA)