Manchester Music - Live Review From the Archive

IN SHREDS
:: Dashboard Confessional ::
07 November 2003 / The Academy 1 / Manchester
By Ed Mellet
Dawson’s Creek. You heard of it? American teen drama – imagine 5 high school kids sat round some bonfire on Santa Barbara beach smoking moderate nondescript amounts of pot and drinking moderate smallish bottles of non descript label less beer. Wicked.. Party. The soundtrack to this would of course be Dashboard Confessional. In anticipation of the money shot Crimea pull out on stage, eager to impress emo kids and glasses boffins alike with a roaring epic of war like proportions. Thrusting and gaoling like a half dead man in a trench full of rotting flesh they scream! They scream! And it’s fucking awful. It tastes like it sounds and it sounds like a war zone, overpowering bombs of acid guitars mixing melody with out of synch guitar loops and growling growling shouting vocal mess… I hate it. I hate it so much it skull fucks my head. I hate it because it’s unapproachable, original, something I’ve never seen before and it’s amazing. What a difference it is to be so threatened by the opening song of an opening band. What a song! And it would have been 5 out of 5 until ”Do you want to see my happy side” which, as it suggests, is a chirpy little number about some love or another. It’s the same as it always has been. The thrill we got when we first came in trails away and we’re left with nothing except for dulcet tones and empty values of an emo band who sing like an American Travis – an American Travis with a mullet-ed Bassist. A nondescript showdown between acoustic and emotive – if you can call it a showdown at all. ”This is about a girl who I used to care a lot about. I hate her now.” So, the crowd cheers. And why? Because 600 hurt emo boys feel the emotional showdown of a girl who never loved them. Because 200 pissed swooning girls fancy the unfittingly tattooed lead singer. Because 5 or 6 press photographers have been told DC are the next big thing from the American scene. Bullshit. If Blink 182 became emo with an emotive pit for a stomach and believed what they created helped stop world famine this is who they’d be. I was told I would cry tonight and I was looking forward to it. I thought these guys would wreck my spleen and evoke suicide and self-loathing, but all I got was bored and thus pissed before the fourth song. A Wheatus tribute mid-set lasts too long and is an actual tribute; this is no irony; this is emo-reality, and 800 fans don’t know what to do. How do you take your favourite band covering one of pop-world’s classics from 2001? The song you hated when it came on at the sixth form disco and made you wretch?! Can you still believe in these guys now?! Blank and perspiring - I got hot for no reason and the band kept their cool. You leave. You weep. But not because they made you. Because your favourite fucking band that kept you up as a child and kept you going as a teen let you down tonight. Moderate band – moderate rock – leave it for the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack to our prescribed teenage lives.


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