Dashboard Confessional, Signaling at Every Turn

Dashboard Confessional shows are as much about the crowd as the band. Charismatic lead confessor Chris Carrabba could get his followers to sing a trigonometry assignment.

Carrabba employed several devices Wednesday at Constitution Hall to encourage screaming from the few fans who weren't already doing so -- and to spur the rest to scream the lyrics even louder. He would quickly step back from the microphone mid-song. Or he'd step sideways. Or he'd spread his tattooed arms wide and turn his palms up. Or he'd point to the rafters. Or have a crew member flicker the house lights.

Whatever the trigger, the result was similar and instantaneous: The crowd volume would swell like a tsunami.

Carrabba, backed for most of the 80-minute set by a rocking quartet, wasn't asking the flock to recite something as simple as "Kumbaya," either. A typical Confessional tune is chorus-free, and although Carrabba is 31, he comes off as an adolescent writing in his diary about just meeting or being dumped by Miss Right. "She smiled in a big way, the way a girl like that smiles when the world is hers," everybody sang on "Dusk and Summer," the title track on the latest Confessional CD, proving that the power of 3,000 or so young voices in unison is undeniable.

But as anybody who's watched a C-SPAN call-in show knows, encouraging audience participation can lead to ugliness. During a quiet moment after Carrabba and his chorus sang his new and typically overwrought "Stolen" ("Too early to say goodnight / You have stolen my heart"), somebody up front yelled something nasty. The jab revealed that Carrabba has something of a glass jaw. "Thanks for buying a ticket!" the singer huffed, then didn't engage the crowd for several tunes.

All was forgiven, though, in time for a group project on the encore of "Hands Down," a tune Carrabba said was written "about the best day I ever had." The fans sang as if it were about their best day, too.

-- Dave McKenna