Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

1) Brand New, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006)

After a month and a half of this endeavor, you might have come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of crap on this list. I love every album on the list dearly, but I’m self-aware enough to admit that I wouldn’t go to a wine and cheese party and try to wax philosophic about the subtler nuances of Taking Back Sunday.

As I said in this week’s vital interpolation, and this should have come as a surprise to no one, taste in music is subjective. And so while I chafe slightly at the judgment of sundry music snobs looking down their nose at the music I like, it usually rolls of my back quickly when I realize that everyone likes crap in some form or other, including the snobs. I try to avoid proclaiming that the stuff I like is any better or worse than the stuff you like, because really, who are any of us to judge?

All of this is to say, were I to find myself at a wine and cheese party and someone broached the topic of the best albums of the Zeroes, I would probably wait around patiently, noshing on my smoked gouda-on-a-table-water-cracker before politely interjecting, “Yes, This Is It was a very good album, but did you listen to The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me?”

Devil and God puts me in mind of the great paradox that we all find ourselves in w/r/t our favorite bands. On the one hand, there’s a reason you love them, so you want to hear the same, consistent sound. Of course, the band that stays consistent opens itself to accusations of being a one-trick pony, a trite and hackneyed joke. On the other hand, we like our bands to grow and develop. But if a band strays too much from the winning formula, well, “howling fantods” isn’t a strong enough term to describe our reaction. (I can’t count how many different people listed “old Blink-182″ as a favorite band in their AIM profile after Enema of the State came out.) So, in review, we want our bands to keep the same sound that made us fall in love with them, but also to develop and advance musically. Got it?

I think this desire for our favorite bands to grow (if it’s not something I completely invented) is kind of like a security blanket. We get to cling to the bands of our youth, but it’s not pathetic, because look, they’re actually a better band than they were when I started listening to them. If our bands don’t grow with us, it’s like a betrayal. We’re forced to look into the eyes of our own mortality and admit that there are some things that have to be left in the toybox. Take it from me: I just spent a month littering the tubes with however many words about emo records from eight years ago.

When Devil and God came out at the end of 2006, Brand New fans were almost at the end of their ropes. It had been more than three years since the release of their sophomore effort, the excellent Deja Entendu. Which would be fine, were it not for the band’s notoriously reclusive nature. There were no dates, no news, no nothing until early 2006, when nine untitled demos recorded for the new album leaked onto the Internet. (Incidentally, shortly thereafter I found myself sitting at a bar in Providence, Rhode Island, after the first show Brand New had played in almost two years, with lead guitarist Vin Accardi. [This is like, the only name-dropping story I have, so please indulge me. And Linda, please corroborate this in comments.] He said that one of the tech guys in the studio had had those demos [which took on the moniker Fight Off Your Demons, after the band's new URL, and is a pretty damn good album in its own right] on an iPod, which he proceeded to accidentally leave in a pizza parlor, where it was somehow picked up by some enterprising fan who proceeded to put them on the Internet. It seemed like a far-fetched story, to say the least.)

Long story short, Brand New’s third album was much-anticipated, and I bought it the minute it came out. I can’t lie: I was underwhelmed! It was too dark. It was too much of a departure from the band’s emo roots. I took to heart criticisms like those leveled in Rolling Stone’s dismissal of the album: “But the selling—and sticking—point is still dark drama, with shadowy, shimmery textures, agonized choruses and frontman Jesse Lacey yowling away and dropping ponderous poetry like a guy with his heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf.” I had the reaction of a self-loathing pop punk fan: it was inconceivable that an emo band I liked could produce a serious piece of art.

I’ve been beating this quote into the ground, but it’s always been true: the songs you grow to like never stick at first. The more I listened, the more every track grew on me, to the point where I would just listen to the whole thing all the way through. That’s right: there’s no skippable song. Not only was the music masterful; that could have been expected, based on the leap Brand New made between Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Entendu. Not only were the words poetry; Jesse Lacey is a crafter of lyrical miracles. No one disputes this. I guess I just wasn’t prepared to encounter an actual thought-provoking album, where I would find myself thinking about the songs long after I stopped listening. Is it so bad for a songwriter to have his “heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf”? That’s a couple more philosophy books than most people have!

So, what happens when an emo band grows up? They find God, in a manner of speaking. (You couldn’t tell from the title of the album?) Yes, Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s favorite album of the decade is also the most existentially dreadful one on the list. It’s refreshing, in its way. I understand that not a lot of people are going to the Billboard charts for their theology, but on the other end, there’s not a whole lot of critical thought regarding religion going on in popular music these days. It’s like Kanye says: “They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus. / That means guns, sex, lies, video tapes, / But if I talk about God my record won’t get played.”

I won’t dissect entire album’s various religious messages, just what I think is the main one: redemption, and its possibility or lack thereof. In the second track, “Millstone” (that’s an allusion to Mark 9:42, for those scoring at home: “And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck”), we get the first seed of doubt: “I used to pray like God was listening,” Lacey laments, before a uh, fine point is put on things in “Jesus.” The song is one side of a conversation between our protagonist and Our Lord and Savior himself, asking all the usual questions: “Well Jesus Christ I’m alone again. / So what did you do those three days you were dead? / ‘Cause this problem’s gonna last more than the weekend. / Well Jesus Christ I’m not scared to die. / I’m a little bit scared of what comes after: / Do I get the gold chariot? / Do I float through the ceiling? / Do I divide and pull apart?”

At the end, we get to Lacey’s view of the relationship between Christ and ourselves: “And I know you think that I’m someone you can trust, / But I’m scared I’ll get scared / And I swear I’ll try to nail you back up . . . / But we’ve all got wood and nails. / We don’t turn out hate in factories.” Say what you will about how crummy Christianity has been and continues to be, but I think we can all agree that Jesus was a pretty righteous dude. To imply that after 2,000 odd years, we would still be compelled to fear and punish that kind of goodness, and further, that the spark of hatred and violence doesn’t come from the outside, but rather burns in every man’s heart, says a lot about Jesse Lacey’s low opinion of humanity in general. Is he right? Do each of us have wood and nails?

Clearly, mankind is still in need of redemption, but you won’t find a ton of it in The Devil and God. (To wit, in “You Won’t Know,” for instance, we learn that “They say in Heaven there’s no husbands and wives. / On the day that I show up they’ll be completely out of their forgiveness supplies.” Oh well, right?) Fortunately, we hear from JC himself later on in the album, which leads me to my

Signature track: Limousine

“Limousine” is a song about a young girl named Katie Flynn who was killed in a drunk driving accident on Long Island in 2005. It’s a terrible enough story, some of the details of which are recounted here, to inspire a complete stranger to write a haunting, powerful song about it. There’s an interpretation of “Limousine,” which I’ll run with here, that says the song features the voices of the three principles in Katie’s story. The first long, chant-like portion of the song is supposed to be her mother. The second, a prayer from her killer. And finally, Katie speaks in the muted portion behind the frenetic climax of “Limousine,” reflecting on the life she’ll never get to actually live: “I’ll never have to buy adjacent plots of earth. / We’ll never have to rot together underneath the earth. / I’ll never have to lose my baby in the crowd. / I should be laughing right now.”

(I encourage you to watch the band play this song live. That link is from a show I actually went to a few months ago. It’s eerie and moving stuff, and probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a collective spiritual experience at a rock show.)

I’m most concerned with that middle part, though: “Dear Beauty Supreme, / Yeah you were right about me. / But can I get myself back from underneath this guilt that will crush me? / And in the choir I saw our sad messiah. / He was bored and tired of my laments. / Said, ‘I’d die for you one time but never again.’” Never again. Ouch. A lot of us consider God or Jesus or whoever as an all-forgiving, all-redeeming presence, and there are certainly arguments for that way of thinking. Taken rationally, though (and I know that’s a lot to ask of religion [I don't mean that as a dig!]), the question Lacey is asking here is, what more can we ask of Christ? If dying for us isn’t enough to get humanity on the right track, what else is there that a savior can do? Of course, it’s catechismical common sense that the whole redemption thing is a two-way street: God will take care of you if you do your part. Lacey takes a bit of a more pessimistic position: if you were hoping for a higher power to look out for you, you might be out of luck.

At first blush, this is a tremendous downer. And I’ll offer my amateur, theological know-nothing interpretation of Jesse Lacey’s lyrics, but I won’t speak for whatever kind of faith the man has in his heart. He may very well believe that there’s no hope for us at all, and considering that the types of tragedies that took the life of Katie Flynn are happening every day all over the world, it’s understandable that he would think that’s the case. I take a more affirmative message from “Limousine,” and from the whole album in general. I sort of kind of addressed this issue back in the day on this blog’s earlier iteration, w/r/t Barack Obama’s election, and the perfectibility of our union, but there’s a message there that applies to the conduct of our lives in general: “Thou mayest rule over sin.” Or thou mayest not. It’s up to you. If God isn’t listening, and if Christ died for us one time but never again, then that means that if we’re to be redeemed, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Making ourselves, and our world, better is our own responsibility, and no one else’s. And if it turns out that God is there, we’ll have done right by him. Feather on.

This might be a bit of a spoiler for old friends of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, so if the end of this list being a surprise is important to you, feel free to skip this post. I can’t imagine that anyone out there in Internet land actually cares the much, but I figured I would alert anyone that does.

Basically, Brand New’s Your Favorite Weapon isn’t Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s Favorite Album of the Decade, and I thought it would be nice to explain why. Since, as those aforementioned old friends of DD&U can attest, Your Favorite Weapon not only got me into the whole emo/pop punk scene, but it’s probably the seminal album of my late-teen/young adult life.

There was about a two-year period while I was in college for which Your Favorite Weapon provides an almost perfect archaeology. At one point or another, each track held profound meaning for me. Jude Law and a Semester Abroad. Sudden Death in Carolina. Failure By Design. Soco Amaretto Lime. And, of course, Seventy Times 7. There was something in all of these songs that I deeply identified with. I won’t bore you with the details, but feel free to listen through and try to piece together a psychological profile.

You might ask, precious reader, how I could leave off the list an album that came the closest an album can come to changing my life? It may sound anticlimactic, but that part of my life is over. I’ve made my peace with the cast of characters who gave that part of my life, and hence the album, the meaning that it had. I wish I could give you a better explanation than the water has flowed under the bridge, but thems the facts. I’ve grown up, and mellowed out. Your Favorite Weapon has become less a description of my life than a relic.

This post, characteristic of the music it’s describing, is tending toward melodrama, which leads to the larger point I wanted to make. See, I still listen to Your Favorite Weapon. Consistently. I love it. So if I feel like I’ve grown up, how come I still find myself drawn to this type of music?

The biggest knock against emo/pop punk bands like old-school Brand New, Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday, and their ilk is that the music is flamboyantly maudlin at best, and dangerously self-indulgent and immature at worst. There are too many gravely important things going on in the world, too many people with actual real-life problems, to take seriously some indie-acoustic troubadour on stage complaining about how another girl broke his precious little heart. People who have criticized my taste in music have almost all, to a man, brought up this navel-gazing conceit. That shit might fly for high school girls, but not for grown-ups.

There’s a way in which I shouldn’t even really have to mount a defense. I like this music. I just do. Taste in art in general, and music in particular, is one of the most subjective things there is. This is why I try not to be too critical of what I might think is someone’s bad taste in music, because they might think the same thing about me, and would I be able to conceive of an adequate and persuasive argument if that were the case? Probably not!

But I do think the critique about emo music being self-indulgent is salient and worth at least going a little deeper into. It’s a true fact that if your best friend dating your ex-girlfriend, or your girlfriend cheating on you is your biggest problem, then you’ve probably got a not so bad life, relatively speaking. Which is true! The emo critic goes on, though, to imply that the emo fan shouldn’t waste his time with such whiny dreck. Or, at least, that he has bad taste for wasting his time with such whiny dreck. And, if the criticism goes to its conclusion, the emo fan has a warped set of priorities because he likes music about guys lamenting their broken hearts while there’s actual, real suffering going on in the world. I’m not setting up a strawman here; I’ve heard this kind of thing!

The way I see it, I can afford to identify with and find meaning in this type of music, and I count my blessings every day for that fact. See, I’m a grown man: I’m not so naive as to believe that my problems, and the problems that are the fodder of emo songs, are the worst things ever. Listening to emo and pop punk music, far from being an exercise in woe-is-me self-indulgence, actually offers me perspective as to how good I’ve actually got it. It makes me thankful for the opportunities I’ve been afforded, and appreciative of people who have faced obstacles that I’ll never have to. As I said, if the worst that can happen so far is I have a spat with a pal, then things must be going alright.

Am I overthinking this? Of course I am! It’s just emo music, guys. And for those of you who think all of this is BS and want to continue to poke fun at my lame tastes, check out Emocapella, George Washington University’s all-emo acapella group. I assure you that they’re everything you could possibly imagine.

Stay What You Are

2) Saves the Day, Stay What You Are (2001)

When I was in grammar school and high school, I was obviously into listening to music, but not really in a way beyond listening to what was on the radio. (For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s younger readers, a radio was an electronic box that received signals through the air and transformed them into music. [For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun's older and well, my-aged readers, did anyone else always have a blank tape in the stereo, and go home immediately after school and listen to the radio until dinnertime, and record all the songs you liked {except you'd always have to time it so you didn't include the insipid DJ chatter at the start, so even though you had eight tapes and they all had Blink 182's "Dammit" on it, none of them had the guitar riff in the intro. Does} anyone remember] that?)

Long story short, I listened to plenty of music, but none of it was stuff that wasn’t at or near the top of the alternative rock charts, so I never had the type of punk-rock, emo outcast, let’s-go-to-a-local-band’s-concert-at-the-American-Legion-hall musical youth that a lot of people I know had. Which is a shame, because I would have loved to have checked out a Saves the Day show in some dingy parish center in Bloomfield, plugged in, playing tunes from Can’t Slow Down, maybe dancing next to some skinny Northern Jersey emo chick with dark eyeliner and some metal in her face. Who knows how things would have turned out!

Stay What You Are is a bit of a departure from Saves the Day’s first two punkier albums. The lyrics and melodies are a little more subdued. (I say this, but then you listen to a song like “As Your Ghost Takes Flight,” with such lyrics as “The last time that I saw you, August of ‘99, / I should’ve had my hammer and a few rusty spikes / To nail you on a wall and use bottles to catch your blood / And display you for the neighbors so they know your time had come.” So, you know, take my judgment with a grain of salt.) The first track, “At Your Funeral” (which includes my favorite bassline in all of rock music), sets the tone for the upbeat nature of the album. I say “upbeat” in a strictly musical sense, as the lyrical content sways from angry (the aforementioned “As Your Ghost Takes Flight”) to depressed (”See You”: And I’ll wear glass shoes and plastic wrap. / No, I’ll just wear my insides. / You want to know who I really am? / Yeah so do I) to ecstatic (”Firefly”: We’re up and we’re out and we’re yelling through the streets / and I’m out of my fucking mind) to despondent (”All I’m Losing Is Me”: The moon hangs like the blade of an axe tonight, / And it’s poised to drop sometime soon enough / On this dump truck where I lie mixed up with the morning’s trash) to whistful (”Nightingale”: I’ll have to walk a thousand miles just to find the ground deserving of your feet). It’s all couched in (relatively) peppy melodies, the value of which can’t be overstated: no matter what mood you’re in, there’s a song on this album that’ll make you feel better, or at least validated. (And if you’re just in the mood for some good tunes, then you’re in luck.)

Signature track: “This Is Not An Exit”

One time, I asked my ex-girlfriend what her favorite color was. (I don’t mean to keep bringing her up on this blog, because Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun is most certainly NOT that kind of blog. It just so happens that this particular anecdote that includes her as a foil is the best way for me to introduce a point I’d like to make about Saves the Day.) Anyway, she looked at me like I had 10 heads. “What do you mean, favorite color,” she asked. “I like a lot of colors.” My favorite color is green. I figured everyone had a favorite color. Everyone had favorite colors when were kids, right? It’s how you knew what ball to pick when you played mini golf, or which kinds of M&Ms to save for last when you had a whole handful. I was left feeling like I had missed the boat on opening my heart to new colors.

And then I wondered if people feel the same way about songs. They have to, right? If a person can’t commit to a color (and I’m limiting “color” here to like, the rainbow and its reasonable offshoots. I don’t want to hear any “I like #F600FF” nonsense in the comments), how could they possibly commit to a song? I don’t know how it works. But I do know that “This Is Not An Exit” is my favorite song.

Not my favorite rock tune. Not my favorite song of the decade. My favorite song. It’s not that other songs aren’t good. It’s just that I like this one the most. That’s why you’re reading about this album, plain and simple. All of its songs are very very good, and one of them is my favorite. And, at the end of the day, if the hook sets in the bottom of our lungs, we’ll rip it out and lick the blood off with our tongues.

Tell All Your Friends

3) Taking Back Sunday, Tell All Your Friends (2002)

Part of what turns music you like into music you love is sharing it with other people. Tell All Your Friends is one of those albums that me and my high school crew all love. It’s tough to come across records like that, even among people who like the same type of music. As a consequence, every track incites Proustian remembrances of some kind of a good time. That’s a good album right there!

Tell All Your Friends is the debut album of the Long Island emo/pop punk outfit Taking Back Sunday. The band has put out several more albums since, with different lineups, and they’re all pretty good. None, however, matches that first album with Eddie Reyes on guitar, Mark O’Connell on drums, Shaun Cooper on bass, John Nolan on guitar and backing vocals, and the inimitable Adam Lazzara on lead vocals. That particular lineup only lasted one album, with the aforementioned Nolan and Cooper leaving to form Straylight Run. Oh well, right? Can’t complain about that turn of events, since it produced two of my favorite albums of the decade.

There’s a number of things that make TBS the band that it is. One is the superhuman pipes of Mr. Lazzara. Like a running quarterback that refuses to learn how to slide before getting laid out by a 250-pound linebacker, Lazzara treats his vocal chords as recklessly as if they weren’t the instrument through which he makes his living. Witness his transition from one-marble-in-the-mouth warbling to lung-busting screams to larynx-shattering wailing and back again on tracks like “Bike Scene,” “Timberwolves at New Jersey,” and “The Blue Channel.” I dunno how long the guy can keep it up.

The vocals would just be window dressing, of course, if they weren’t delivering great lyrics. Of all the albums on this list, Tell All Your Friends is by far the most quotable. If you’ve ever heard Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun say that you’ve got this silly way of keeping me on the edge of my seat; that if we go down, we go down together; that September never gets this cold where I come from; or that I’ve got the mic, and you’ve got the mosh pit, you have Tell All Your Friends to thank. And of course, this album gives us the most archetypically emo lyric in the history of emo music, the line that I would present were I asked to present one example that typifies the conceit of the genre, from “You’re So Last Summer”: “The truth / is you could slit my throat, / and with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt.” Gives you chills, don’t it?

Signature track: “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team)”

Ah, those four chords. I don’t want to harp about the scene, but among connoisseurs of this genre, those four chords are positively iconic. “Cute Without the ‘E’” is just one of those pantheon songs. The jukebox at Mary Ann’s (the worst bar in America, in sunny Cleveland Circle, the Times Square of Brighton, Massachusetts) had this track, and I would play it EVERY time I went there, in the vain hopes that some wicked emo chick, with a choppy haircut and some metal in her face, would should me a knowing glance and mouth the words “The only thing I regret is that I never let you hold me back.” Alas, it never happened. (And for the record, the lyrics that get bleeped out up there are “And will you tell all your friends / you’ve got your gun to my head?” The prudes at MTV need to figure out that there are far worse things on the Intertubes than reference to guns.)

This song encapsulates what I think is the best feature of Tell All Your Friends: the vocal interplay between Lazarra and Nolan. Later incarnations of Taking Back Sunday have featured perfectly capable background vocalists. On the first album, though, there are a fair number of tracks where John Nolan is more of a co-vocalist. The back and forth makes for a real dynamic tune, especially the harmonies toward the end. Also, if you think myself and the Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun weren’t belting out this tune during our now-infamous trip to Long Island, well, you’re just fooling yourself.

A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar

4) Dashboard Confessional, A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar (2003)

Oh, Dashboard Confessional. Is there a more divisive band out there? Dashboard boosters would take a bullet for the band; detractors can’t bring themselves to even listen. (Ok, I may be generalizing, but who knows.) All I know is that of all the emo-type bands that I enjoy, Dashboard tends to elicit the most ughs, blechs, and really?s. You know what? I don’t care. I effing love Dashboard.

The band’s entire catalogue falls well within the confines of our list, so picking one particular album was sort of tough: they’re all so good! However, comma, A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar takes the cake. The decision, in a big way, came down to sheer volume: AMAMABAS has 13 tracks, and all of them are pure dynamite. To quote a song from another album on this list, “even all the bad songs ain’t so bad.” (I’ll go ahead and say that “Morning Calls” is the worst song on the album. Take that how you will.)

A Mark represents Dashboard Confessional’s Newport Folk Festival moment, so to speak. After two acoustic albums, the band’s third full-length featured a full electric band. Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand that I’m a sucker for anything acoustic, but the fact remains that musically, there are certain things you can only do when you’re plugged in.

In this blog’s previous iteration, I’ve talked about the maybe-not-so-rare opening track trifecta on A Mark. As that post makes clear, a strong opening track (which A Mark has) is crucially important, but if the two tracks after that rock too, well, you might have a Top Ten Favorite Album of the Decade on your hands. “Rapid Hope Loss” is as heavy a tune as you’ll find on a Dashboard album (which means not quite that heavy at all), but where the music fails to smash like a hammer, the lyrics cut like a knife: “Well thanks for waiting this long to show yourself. / ‘Cause now that I can see you, / I don’t think you’re worth a second glance.” My favorite track, “As Lovers Go,” follows. I won’t go into too much detail, because it’s a sweet song, and I feel like if I waxed poetic about every sweet song I liked on this list, y’all would get diabetes or something.

Chris Carrabba, as Rolling Stone says, is the godfather of emo. I won’t go into individual tracks too deeply, because in a way, they’re all the same. I mean that in a positive way, though it doesn’t sound like it. What I mean is that, as a songwriter, Carrabba is incredibly consistent. Each song brims with passion, wit, and emotion. He’s among the best there is at what he does.

I like A Mark a lot because, since it came out, it’s been an album that I’ve been able to just sort of hang around in. For a good long while, I listened almost exclusively to the first half. Who knows why: it had songs I liked, and I never bothered getting around to the later tracks. Then I was asking the Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun (what, you’ve never heard of Wait for Summer?) about suggestions for a good summertime playlist. “Why not ‘Carve Your Heart Out’?” he asks me. Why not indeed! As it turns out, for as strong as the album starts, it finishes just as strong: “So Beautiful,” “Hey Girl,” “If You Can’t Leave It Be,” and “Several Ways to Die Trying” are just as addictive as the first four tracks. And so then for the next few months, I hung around almost exclusively in the back end of the album. Then I grew up and realized I could listen to the whole thing, and well, here we are. I just love Dashboard.

Signature track: “Hands Down”

You may or may not know, but Dashboard Confessional is probably the band that exerts the strongest influence on my North Jersey emocore duo, Wait for Summer. The way my buddy Joe and I write lyrics and music, and his vocal stylings, wind up sounding more like Dashboard than anyone else. It’s not on purpose, but it happens. Consequently, I find myself very interested in Chris Carrabba’s songwriting.

My choice of signature track here is another deference to the artist. I’ve been to a few Dashboard Confessional shows, and every one has ended with “Hands Down.” And every time, Carrabba introduces the song the same way: “This is a song about the best night of my life.” I believe it. As I’ve written before, I admire guys that can write songs, autobiographical or not, about things that I just can’t bring myself to. Even if I could pick out the best night of my life, I know I’m wholly incapable of describing it with the detail and honesty of “Hands Down.” This Dashboard tune is sort of the opposite of the Fall Out Boy example: just a song that’s clearly filled with joy, and love, and earnestness. It’ll warm the ol’ cockles of your heart.

Firstly, a housekeeping note. Several devoted readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun have expressed to me concern that I wouldn’t finish this list before the actual end of the decade. To which I respond, so what? Are the post–January 1st entries going to be less valid? Do you guys really look to Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun for timeliness and relevance? Come on, precious readers. It’s like you don’t even know me! I take the “Tim” out of “timeliness.”

Letters

5) Butch Walker, Letters (2004)

Hoo boy. This is the tough part of the countdown, dearest reader. The next four albums, honestly, I could have flipped a coin to determine the order. (How would that work, though? Would I have to seed the albums and have a four-team coin-flip tournament?) Anyway, Letters comes in in the five spot. This particular selection was doubly hard, since Butch Walker’s entire oeuvre (2002’s Left of Self Centered, Letters, 2006’s The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s Go Out Tonites, and last year’s Sycamore Meadows) is pure dynamite.

You might recall Butch Walker as the frontman for the late 90s pop-rock outfit Marvelous 3 (remember their one song, “Freak of the Week”?) The second semester of my freshman year, a couple upperclassman friends of mine invited me to a show at the House of Blues. (The one that used to be in Cambridge; it’s Tommy Doyle’s now. I continue to date myself in these posts, I’m realizing. Oh well!) The opening act was Brian Vander Ark (who sings for the Verve Pipe, and had a solo album of his own that, while not cracking DD&UFAOTD:AMIMIFE, was still pretty good), and the headliner was Butch Walker. He played a few Marvelous 3 tunes (including, if memory serves, “You’re So Yesterday,” which is just an excellent song), and some tracks from his debut solo album. And they were awesome. At that point, I became hooked.

The Zeroes have proven that Butch Walker is true music industry Renaissance man. He performs (I saw him live again a few months ago at the Paradise, and the man knows how to put on a show); he writes (in addition to his own songs, Walker has written many tunes for other artists, including SR-71’s hit “Right Now,” Bowling for Soup’s “Girl All the Bad Guys Want,” and Avril Lavigne’s “My Happy Ending”); and he produces (Walker is one of the most sought-after producers in the biz, producing records for artists like Pete Yorn, Sevendust, the Donnas, Pink, Katy Perry, Weezer, and Dashboard Confessional). He does pop; he does rock; he does metal; he does emo; the man does it all!

So, Letters. You like heartfelt ballads? How about “Mixtape” (But you gave me the best mixtape I have. / And even all the bad songs ain’t so bad. / I just wish there was so much more than that. / About me and you)? Or “Promise” (What was I saying? / There I go playing / The game I know so well. / I’m talking about myself when it should be / You)? You like radio-friendly pop-rock? How about the intoxicating hook and delightful harmonies on “#1 Summer Jam.” You like withering breakup revenge anthems? How about the granddaddy of the withering breakup revenge anthem, (which I’ll link to here, because it was all that I could do to keep from making it my Signature Track) “Best Thing You Never Had.” (Longtime friends of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun will recall these lyrics from sundry away messages from assorted dark times in the life of your favorite blogger: “Like the toilet seat never got lifted / And I pissed on your confidence / When you weren’t around? How can that be? / Don’t turn this around. / You were the one / Who drove my ass right to the ground.”)

Signature Track: “Joan”

I’m going to defer to Mr. Walker here, since I have a good feeling that “Joan” is one of his favorite tracks from Letters. “Joan” is what my pal Reeves likes to refer to as an aural story, so I won’t go and spoil things by transcribing any lyrics. I love this song because it’s a textbook example of how passionate a lyricist and vocalist Butch Walker can be when he wants to. Just a top notch song. I recommend you listen to the whole thing.

International Dance Marathon

6) Grasshopper Takeover, International Dance Marathon (2000)

This is another album that was passed along to me by an old friend who got it for free at a show. So, like, for the information of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s younger readers, yes, this was the way to find out about new music way back in the day. It sounds crazy just typing it, but it’s true.

I have a coworker who plays in a band called Huck. When you ask him to describe his band’s sound, he’ll sort of shrug and say something like “Fun rock. We just play happy music.” I think of that when I think about why I like Grasshopper Takeover. For almost eight years, International Dance Marathon has been my go-to in situations where I need a pick-me-up. It’s not exactly the most sophisticated or hard-hitting rock album out there, but it more than makes up for those shortcomings with foot-tapping melodies and feel-good lyrics. It’s gotta be, by far, the most positive album on this list.

I’d describe GTO as something like 311-lite. (An easy comparison; both bands are from Omaha, and I understand that they’re all pals.) The good folks at CDBaby.com tell me that if you like 311, the Foo Fighters, and Everclear, you might like GTO: that sounds about right! It’s interesting to see these lists of similar artists (Yahoo Music says GTO fans might like Unwritten Law, They Might Be Giants, Cake, and Better Than Ezra), because they’re all definitively 90s bands. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course, since International Dance Marathon is GTO’s third full length album and just barely made it into this decade, with its June 2000 release. I personally thought the 90s were a pretty good decade for alternative rock and power pop tunes. Sure, I’ve come to like (and love) new forms of rock music, and obviously bands like the Foo Fighters are still churning out records, but the fact is that as the days go by, new music like you find on International Dance Marathon becomes rarer. Will this be the last DD&UFAOTD:AMIMIFE with a 90s-style alt-pop album on it? This is me coming to grips with my own mortality, people!

Signature Track: “Forever Young”

The pick for signature track here is sort of a toss-up. I’m a big fan of literally every track, but there’s definitely a Big Three: “Esta Vida,” “Sailing,” and the track you’re listening to up there, “Forever Young.” (You guessed it, precious reader: this song was the only one I could find a decent Youtube video of.) “Forever Young” does the trick, though, in terms of encapsulating GTO’s sound: the shifts in tempo, the hooky melodies, the upbeat lyrics. (You know, like, “First rule says you’ve got to believe in who you are. / Second asks you to believe anything is possible. / Third, get up and do it, boy you’ll be a star. / My roots are constellations, guiding me home.) I gotta tell ya, there’s not a whole left to say. This is a list of my favorite albums, and there’s no writing a list like that without including the album that’s given me warm fuzzies since 2002.

Take This to Your Grave

7) Fall Out Boy, Take This to Your Grave (2003)

So Fall Out Boy is a pretty big band nowadays. So much so that they have a greatest hits album.(?) I mean, I’ll buy it. (The idea, not the actual album. I have all those songs already.) It’s just weird to have a band that you’ve been following for a while to not only put out a greatest hits album, but for said album to include tracks from an album that came out just six years ago.

Oh well. All of this is inconsequential. What does matter is that before Pete Wentz was opening bars that played host to Real World casts, Fall Out Boy put out a lil album called Take This to Your Grave, a venomous, spite-filled, heartfelt emo punk tour de force that, quite frankly, the band has yet to replicate. The band’s second studio album, it has more polish than their debut, Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out with Your Girlfriend, and more fire in the belly than their subsequent records.

There’s an urgency of genuine emotion on this album, and you know how I feel about that sort of thing. To this day, I still re-use the chorus to “Dead on Arrival” in everyday conversation: “This is Side One. / Flip me over. / I know I’m not your favorite record. / The songs you grow to like never stick at first.” (To say nothing of the delightful wordplay in the first verse: “This conversation’s been dead on a / Rivalry goes so deep / Between me and this loss of sleep over you.”) Ditto for “Homesick at Spacecamp”: “My smile’s an open wound without you / And my hands are tied to pages inked to bring you back.”

Why I like Fall Out Boy, and this album in particular, is they manage to get away with saying things that I could never bring myself to say as a songwriter. (And I’ve tried my hand at the songwriting thing. What, you’ve never heard of Wait for Summer? North Jersey Emocore since 2005?) I wrote a story a few years ago about Craig Finn, the lead singer for the band the Hold Steady. Finn said, w/r/t songwriting, that he oftentimes invents characters and scenarios to write songs about. “No one thinks Quentin Tarantino kills people. The characters are a way for me to remove myself from [the songs] in some way, to tell a story that has a cinematic quality or a good story arc without people saying, ‘He’s crazy.’ Especially my mom.” This sounds brilliant on paper, but in practice it’s extremely difficult to pull off. The reason I’ve only written like, two and three-quarters songs is that there’s only so much compelling stuff that I can cull from my autobiography. I’m just a crummy inventor, as it were. And even when there is good stuff to write about, I’m often too timid to commit it to paper, let alone song.

All of this is to say, I’m not sure if the guys in Fall Out Boy practice Craig Finn’s technique, or if they’ve all just been fucked over really bad and don’t give a shit who knows, but hoo boy, are there some potent lines on this album. Just look at the track listing. You’ve got “Sending Postcards from a Plane Crash (Wish You Were Here).” You’ve got “Reinventing the Wheel to Run Myself Over.” And then you’ve got our signature track.

Signature track: “Tell that Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today”

Hopefully my Irish American readers can get over the title of this one (it apparently comes from the movie Rushmore.) This particular video includes lyrics, which should drive the point home that this is an intense song. Like, the chorus: “Let’s play this game called ‘When You Catch Fire.’ / I wouldn’t piss to put you out.” Or, hell, the opening line: “Light that smoke, that one for giving up on me. / One just ’cause they’ll kill you sooner than my expectations.” There’s a strain of pop punk that’s moroseful and whiny, there’s a strain of pop punk that’s mushy, and there’s a strain of pop punk that’s just downright nasty. “Tell That Mick” is the archetypal example of that final strain.

Now, I wouldn’t say that I condone lighting people on fire, or wishing them to be in a horrible car accident, or anything like that. Maybe Pete Wentz does. Or maybe he’s just capable of imagining a situation where he feels that way. Either way, I’ve always been impressed with the courage it takes to write songs that really let loose with intense emotion, whether it be sorrow or longing or rage. I know for a fact that I’m not capable of opening up that much, or even making up a persona capable of opening up that much.

Straylight Run

8 ) Straylight Run, Straylight Run (2004)

Now we’re getting into the nitty gritty. Straylight Run is a band formed by former members of Taking Back Sunday, frontman John Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper. If you’re familiar with TBS, you’ll realize that these two bands couldn’t sound more dissimilar, and that’s a huge part of Straylight’s allure. Here, you’ve got a guy in John Nolan capable of screaming his larynx out on Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends, but then weaving soft, soulful melodies on Straylight Run’s opening track, “The Perfect Ending.” Nolan isn’t the greatest technical vocalist, but the range that he can bring to a track more than makes up for it.

But then again, the fact that he isn’t the smoothest vocalist is another part of the allure. Nolan’s presentation, as a singer and a lyricist, reeks of earnestness. Take the album’s single, “Existentialism on Prom Night.” In a typical pop punk band, you’d hear lyrics like “Sing like you think no one’s listening” and you’d roll your eyes. But in Nolan’s hands, delivered with passion in front of pianos and violins instead of screeching guitars, the words have a sincerity that would have been unavailable to him in a band like TBS. Then there’s my favorite track on the album, “The Tension and the Terror.” From the sensuous lyrics that start the track (All the boys, voices cracking. / Oh, the moaning half tones. / Come summertime, we’re all the same age here. / All the tension and the terror, / Thin-limbed gorgeous green eyes smiling, / And I’m going straight to hell) to the confession that ends it (A look, a laugh, a smile, a second / Passes by and I regret it. / Words just aren’t right. / Sometimes I just can’t explain / All the ways you devastate me. / Always on my mind), the words aren’t sung as much as it would have been impossible for them to not burst forth out of the song. Maybe you don’t hear it that way, but I do.

And let’s not forget the beautiful Michelle DeRosa nee Nolan on background vocals (not to mention the lead on “Toolsheds and Hot Tubs” and “Now It’s Done”). Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand how I feel about girls who can rock. For the uninitiated, I’ll put it simply: they’re the best! There’s really not a ton of ways to eff up a song with the addition of female accompaniment, and Michelle really smooths out her brother’s rough edges.

Signature track: “Your Name Here (Sunrise Highway)”

I admitted up above that “The Tension and the Terror” is my favorite track on this album, but that’s inconsequential at this point. This album is important because of “Your Name Here.” The song is a follow-up to this Taking Back Sunday song, which in turn is a response to this Brand New song. I won’t go into the details of the East Coast/West Coast style feud that marked those bands’ early days, suffice it to say that at a time in my life when I actually WAS emo instead of just being an emo fan, “Your Name Here” helped me to realize that no matter what the conflict is, it’s important to reconcile with the people closest to you if you’ve been driven apart. You just can’t take grudges to the grave.

And then there’s the matter of the chorus: “Go east on Sunrise Highway. / Turn left on Carmans Avenue. / Go right at the first stoplight / And I’ll be outside, waiting for you.” The lyrics are meant to be directions, from John to his estranged pal Jesse, to John’s house on Long Island, ostensibly so they can peace things up. Of course, you can’t put driving directions in a song without diehard fans actually following them, which is what myself, my pal Caitlin, and my buddy Joe, Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, did one July afternoon. Here’s a picture of me, driving east on Sunrise Highway.

My other hand is at 10. What form!

Now, of course, unless you’re crazy, you wouldn’t put the EXACT directions to your house in a song that, who knows, could become a number 1 hit. So there’s really no such thing as “Carmans Avenue,” but there is a Carmans Road in Massapequa. And you can’t actually turn left onto it; rather, you’ve got to make a U-turn and then turn right. And at that point, if you go right at the first stop light, you’re really only hooking back up with Sunrise Highway. Here’s a photograph of your hero, this blog’s protagonist, me, at the final destination of the chorus to “Your Name Here.”

Womp womp

So, you know, did we learn anything? Is there some sort of didactic moral to this sad tale of a wasted afternoon? Absolutely not. Except, every time I go to a Straylight Run show and this song gets played, I get to nudge the dude next to me and say “Hey, I did that!” Ah, memories.

Thixotropic

9) The Low Life, Thixotropic (2003?)
I took a writing workshop about music in college, and apparently I learned nothing, because I’m having a hard time describing Thixotropic on the merits. (This will be a recurring theme in the days to come, precious reader. My apologies in advance.) The vibe I get from The Low Life is that sound like a homeless man’s Red Hot Chili Peppers. (Here, I’m not talking about the hits, but rather the deeper cuts from albums like Californication and By the Way. [Why, the astute reader might ask, did I choose "a homeless man's Red Hot Chili Peppers" when that band, in fact, put out a couple of pretty good albums in the 00s? Well, to paraphrase Robbie Hart, I have the blog, and you don't, so you will listen to every damn word that I have to say!])

What was I saying?

Yes. Thixotropic. Tremendous album. As you might recall from last post, I struggled to whittle down my list of favorite albums to a manageable 10. Consequently, any outside factors that could help sway my decision were welcomes. Hence The Low Life’s appearance. Allow me to explain.

It was a more innocent time, the summer of 2003. A pal and I were driving down the shore, and she threw in a CD, and the first track was wicked catchy. So was the second. Then the third. And so on. How often do you hear a random band that turns out to be awesome? I’d certainly never heard of The Low Life before. And to boot, my friend only knew about these guys because someone handed her a free CD outside a rock club. Or something like that. Anyway, that CD was Thixotropic. I’ve had it with me for a long time.

The band, native to the DC-Baltimore area, has since broke up, leaving behind this album and the follow-up Daisy Cutter. Their website used to say something along the lines of “The Low Life is a robot killing machine sent back in time to save the future by destroying the present.” I’d say that describes their sound pretty accurately! The aforementioned first track, “In My Bed,” sets the tone for the album, both musically and lyrically: breezy guitars, jazzy basslines, and just the right sprinkling of bongo drums, coupled with a fairly grim view of relations with the fairer sex. Female readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun might recoil at lyrics like “Zip off your boots, spit out your gum. / Get in my bed. / Just because you’re pretty doesn’t make you dumb,” but the song’s protagonist, and indeed most of the album’s protagonists, are boorish enough caricatures that their critiques must be taken with a few requisite grains of salt. Notable and telling exceptions, though, include the album’s closer, “Four Walls,” a tender and melodic little acoustic tune that frontman Evan Bliss seemed to like so much that he reprised it on his first solo album, Pour-Soi en Soi. Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand that I wear my heart on my sleeve, so sweet lyrics like “This is where we’ll call home. / Got four walls and a burning stove. / I can’t buy you gold when push comes to shove. / All you’ll have around your neck is my love,” are right in my wheelhouse.

Signature track: “Bag of Money”

True confession, guys: “Four Walls” is actually my choice for signature track, but unfortunately there aren’t any decent recordings of it out there on the Intertubes. No matter, though! This wouldn’t be a top 10 list if there weren’t an almost equally great song on deck. That song is “Bag of Money,” which tells the story of a bank-or-convenience-store-but-the-distinction-is-inconsequential robber who falls in love with one of his victims. (”Let’s leave our lives behind. / A bag of money and the car’s still running. / No time for acting shy, / Losing time with the cop cars coming.”) It’s all relatively straightforward, but you know I’m a sucker for a hooky song, and one that has a lot of different, catchy melodies. “Bag of Money” is where it’s at.

Since I sort of cheated you out of a signature track, let me make it up to. Click here to listen to a live performance by The Low Life from 2004, courtesy of the Internet Archive (which is a just dynamite resource for live music. Really amazing, actually.) I saw these guys one time at the legendary Crossroads in Garwood, New Jersey. I was the designated driver that night, and I remember being so antsy not being able to drink at a rock show at a club that I bought a pack of cigarettes. So yeah, you could smoke in a bar. That’s how long ago it was!