44. Further Seems Forever – The Moon is Down
“I hope this letter finds you well”
I really can’t say exactly what it is about The Moon is Down that draws me in the way it does. Maybe it’s the beach imagery, the romantic “fling” glorification or the general sense of urgency with which the record comes alive. But whenever I listen, there’s this indefinable visceral reaction I get; and it doesn’t just boil inside of me, it erupts.
The closest thing to “emo” (whatever that means) in my CD collection, Further Seems Forever’s debut release (and only with Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba) isn’t just a series of love songs and angst ballads. It’s a document of summer, an autobiography of a youth spent on the coast that’s told in flashes and bursts, lustful sweeps of electric melancholy and guitars that chug and drive and yearn, trying their hardest to echo like so many memories.
A Boca Raton native, Carrabba’s got a thing for the beach. And it’s not just here—Dashboard has more than its fair share of nods to the beautiful way that weather, seasons and the coast can break your heart. The most obvious of these is probably D/C’s Dusk and Summer album, which pictures Carrabba on the front cover, standing in the glow of a Florida shoreline just before nightfall, looking both intensely fulfilled and perfectly miserable. This is his home, Carrabba, and I imagine it’s where almost everything worth remembering in his life happened to him.
There’s a frantic sense of that in the Moon is Down, a sense that surrounded by this force, the force of the familiar, the ocean can either be infinitely comforting or hopelessly depressing. It can wrap its arms around you or leave you tiny in the sand, alone to ponder just how quickly it could swallow you up if it wanted to.
Because of how popular (and annoyingly controversial) Dashboard is, it’s hard not to read The Moon is Down from a Chris Carrabba angle. But for me that’s part of its magic. It’s like hearing a bare bones acoustic version of a song that’s all distortion and drum fills. It can sometimes be revelatory.
The Carrabba most people are familiar with is raw and sentimental, strumming away at his acoustic six-string while slowly drowning in a kind of hyper sensitivity that, if you look close enough, shockingly resembles Total Honesty*. It’s the Dashboard M.O. So when you fill it out, filter it through anger and speed and strip it of its sweetness, it makes for a strange and interesting game of Could’a Been.
*I think Sarah Vowell was right in This American Life when she said that the break-up lyrics that always ring the most genuine, are the most utterly pitiful ones. I also think Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree is dead on that the saddest songs are often the most beautiful.
And maybe that’s where the mood I love so much in this piece comes from: that mixed bag quality of swirling the colors of garage emo-rock, capable lyricism and Carrabba’s gravity together to make something that kicks and tears, but never feels abrasive. Maybe that adds to the ”postcard of youth” factor, too—the “young townies” out at night, one minute in love with their “long forgotten beach town” and the ships offshore that they’d make stories for with girls, and the next feeling strangled by it, when the girls leave for summer and the sea transforms into a symbol for nothing more than miles and space.
“Always remember the sound of the stereo”
What’s interesting is how, for Carrabba, all of the most intense emotions seem inextricably tied up and fused with setting. Love, summer, heartache, the lifeguard stand—every aspect of each object and memory in his songwriting bounces shades off the others. Look at “So Long, So Long” from Dusk and Summer, a love letter in the purest sense of the word to Florida’s coast in the middle months, told from the perspective of someone leaving town and watching as he drives away the beach run across his car window like the beam from an aging film projector.
Ideas are so wound up into one in this track that it sometimes seems impossible to know when one reference starts and another begins.
“I drive this ocean road
And remember (the small of your back, nape of your neck, I remember everything)
As I drive. I’m waving this town goodbye”
Though “So Long, So Long” has got to be Carrabba at his most direct with the beach/love/home dynamic, The Moon is Down is him at his most consistent. Even in the songs that don’t scream “FLORIDA” it’s always clear that it’s there, whispering light static somewhere past the trees and in the background. The shoreline isn’t just a theme here, it’s a living, breathing character. It doesn’t speak or act, necessarily, but it looms, casting holy or ominous shadows over all the words and actions happening around it.
There’s value in all of this, though—at least for Carrabba there is. With albums like The Moon is Down, it’s clear, home is Home as much because of the painful things that happened there as the peaceful ones. The most important moments we have, it tells us, are simply the ones worth remembering. You have to embrace all of it, or else one day you might look up and the sea will just be lying there stagnant, a meaningless pool of filth and ripples.
Like so many of Carrabba’s themes, the whole of The Moon is Down is leagues greater than the sum of its parts. This isn’t something that was planned, I’m sure, but it shines through in mood, becoming a record with a genuine sense of history shoved inside its scattered images. The little things literally become the big things here, a sentiment that’s echoed often in Carrabba’s work and perfectly in the title track of Dashboard’s Dusk and Summer.
He sings:
“Some things tie your life together
In slender threads of things to treasure
Days like that should last, and last, and last.”
And so they do.
Listen:
Dashboard Confessional: “So Long, So Long”
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This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 8:10 pm and is filed under cd reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
