Dashboard Confessional: Mtv Unplugged V2.0 : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The joke about this live acoustic set is that Dashboard Confessional aren't particularly "plugged" on any of their records -- the foursome's gentle heart-on-the-sleeve emo anthems are almost invariably built around folky guitar playing, clear-as-a-bell melody and a raw-sounding, if not terribly wild, rhythm section. The only thing MTV Unplugged 2.0 accomplishes is to give the adoring adolescents in the crowd a chance to shout out lines such as "Kiss me hard/'Cause this will be the last time that I let you. "When he's not letting the teenagers do his singing for him, Chris Carrabba, Dashboard's coiffed, tatted frontman, hacks at his guitar and yelps like a little lost boy as he runs through his big book of high school poetry. The consistency of Carrabba's universally brokenhearted oeuvre is admirable in its own weird way, but these rote rehashings, plus the accompanying DVD of the television broadcast, positively scream "fans only."