dashboard confessional

Record #732: Dashboard Confessional – So Impossible EP (2001)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Dashboard Confessional So Impossible EP vinyl reviewI’ve told the story before of buying The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most at a music store in Florida on my fifteenth birthday. Little did I know that that very same day, Dashboard Confessional released a delightful concept EP that only the most emo of emo bands could pull off.

So Impossible is a four-track story of a first date with the singer’s crush, aided only by his own acoustic guitar and the acoustic noodlings of Sunny Day Real Estate’s Dan Hoerner.

In writing, it sounds like the kind of thing that should be lost to the forgotten custom HTML of LiveJournal pages. But in spite of—or maybe even because of—its simplicity, it remains enduringly charming.

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Record #709: Dashboard Confessional – The Swiss Army Romance (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

While The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most was one of the albums that kickstarted my emo phase, The Swiss Army Romance is the one that cemented it. While I probably gave each of them equal play time in my Discman, Swiss Army was my clear favorite.

True, the two albums have nearly identical aesthetics, and the songwriting is of the same quality across both discs. But there’s something about the completely stripped down sonic palette of Swiss Army that makes these songs more effective than the full band treatments that would fill the track lists of later albums.

Dashboard’s main appeal was its rawness. These songs are almost too intimate to invite anyone else into, begging to be sung (or screamed) entirely on one’s own. And apart from a couple background voices, this album offers that rawness in a purer form than the project would ever attain again.

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Record #704: Dashboard Confessional – The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most (2001)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Now this is more like it.

No more weird live versions or late-career tracks from a compilation that is clearly a cash grab.

This here is the real deal: the long-awaiting vinyl pressing of the seminal emo classic The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, an album that has been equally revered and reviled—usually by the same people at different periods in their life.

But having long since past the point of shame, I can now embrace this album as wholly as I did when I was a shaggy haired, ripped-jean, cardigan-clad, square-frame-bespectacled emo kid.

Wait…I guess things haven’t changed that much…

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Record #682: Dashboard Confessional – The Best Ones of the Best Ones (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

My fifteenth birthday was a formative one. While on vacation with my family, I made the conscious decision to stop spiking my hair and instead push it forward. I decided to put away my past-the-knee shorts and skate shoes in favor of slim fit jeans and Chuck Taylors. And when given free reign at a CD shop, I bought Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most (and the first two Juliana Theory EPs) instead of the earlier Blink-182 albums that I had been eyeing for a while.

I had weighed the options, and decided: I was going to be an emo kid.

And over the next year, Dashboard Confessional would be central to that process. I absolutely devoured the first two albums, detuning my guitar to Chris Carabba’s open chords and training my voice to yelp similarly. I was even reminded recently of a short-lived solo project called Just My Luck that aped every part of his own solo work.

But unfortunately, those two records are nearly impossible to find on vinyl. Copies of Swiss Army Romance go for over $250. The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most has never been pressed (though his next two Vagrant releases were reissued a couple years ago?) And so, I found myself with no choice than to swallow my pride and buy this uneven and, at times, bizarre compilation.

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