Dashboard Confessional - 'A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar' *A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar -- a Joke. Chris Carrabba, better known as Dashboard Confessional, follows up 2001’s The Places You Have Come to Fear The Most with an equally emo, yet strangely uplifting effort which should please those so-called “emo-ers.”Call me an elitist, or even call me a music snob, but this leaf in the wind they call a genre is nothing more than that. Carrabba, being the poster boy of emo that he is, lends yet another chapter to a book which seems to be nothing more than a hybrid of the geeky, outsider standards of Weezer and the angst, angst and MORE angst of punk rock. This isn’t the punk of yesteryear that fellow music aficionados love and embrace such as the Sex Pistols and the original Misfits lineup; this brand of punk from which emo borrows is that of the quasi-punk overlords Good Charlotte and New Found Glory.Okay, so the album is not as bad as the typical emo garbage that has been floating around in recent years; it does offer some catchy riffs and choruses. Carrabba even found a little joy and took time out from complaining about how tough his life is to jot down a few songs about how grand and beautiful love really is. Well, let’s just flip a coin and decide whether it’s black or white because one extreme deserves another. But, then again, it is emo.It is unclear where Carrabba was heading when he recorded this album. He turned around from his anti-MTV, anti-radio, anti-label and anti-everything lifestyle to embrace the limelight. It seems as though the hundreds of screaming teenage girls at MTV2 Unplugged must have helped him to realize that fame is actually kind of fun. Carrabba even went so far as to take his mediocre third release to the Universal Music Group to market it to a larger number of people; if that’s not contradicting emo philosophy, then I don’t know what is.Look Chris, I’m sorry that you are a millionaire now, I’m sorry that you are lusted after by thousands of screaming pre-teen girls, I’m even sorry you never learned how to carry a tune, but please keep your brand of emo-rock on the indie level because you annoy me.