“Do you feel like singing along a little bit?” Christopher Carrabba really wanted to know. Or he really wanted the fans to think he really wanted to know. Or he really wanted to remind the fans that he knew that they really wanted him to really want to know.

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Forum: Popular Music

Rahav Segev for The New York Times

Christopher Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional performing at the Garden.

Mr. Carrabba was playing a glorious sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden on Friday night with his band, Dashboard Confessional. He sang 14 songs, accompanied at all times by thousands of (mainly) teenage voices. Surely every concert has an element of ritual, but a Dashboard Confessional concert is a ritual first and foremost. You pay your money hoping not for new songs or new arrangements, but for old ones and for a chance to drown out the singer.

Long before a sold-out Madison Square Garden concert seemed possible, Dashboard Confessional was merely a side project; Mr. Carrabba’s main job was leading Further Seems Forever, a Christian punk band from Florida. But it turned out Mr. Carrabba had a knack for strummed love songs, and the increasing popularity of Dashboard Confessional eventually turned him into emo’s first real rock star. His 2003 album, “A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar,” has sold more than 800,000 copies.

In June he released the follow-up, “Dusk and Summer” (Vagrant/Interscope), which sounds bigger and tamer: it includes 10 sturdy rock songs, and it is both less histrionic and less charming than his earlier albums. Compared with the flamboyant kids who rule emo right now, Mr. Carrabba, 31, seems like a sensible elder statesman.

But when it comes to putting on a big rock show, he has only gotten better. Although he occasionally picked up an acoustic guitar, he played most of the concert with an electric guitar, or with nothing but a microphone, while his band worked to inflate the songs to U2-ish proportions. (Dashboard Confessional has toured with U2, and that band’s longtime producer, Daniel Lanois, worked with Mr. Carrabba on some of the new music.) The set included the best songs from the new album, along with the band’s current single, “Stolen,” which revolves around a refrain that might embarrass a more embarrassable heartthrob: “You have stolen my heart.”

But Mr. Carrabba knows how to deliver a line like that; you don’t have to believe it, you just have to seem as if you don’t not believe it. (If you hear the song on the radio and it sounds better than the version you remember, there’s a reason: The radio version is faster than the album version, and about 30 seconds shorter.)

Mr. Carrabba’s opening act was Brand New, a Long Island band that released a brilliant album, “Deja Entendu,” in 2003. But the new Brand New album, “The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me” (Interscope), is a disappointment, with plenty of competent and knotty emo songs but not enough charm or wit. And Brand New’s live set was disappointing, too: in that arena the flailing bodies and drawn-out endings somehow made the band seem smaller, not bigger.

By contrast, the only thing wrong with Mr. Carrabba’s streamlined set was its brevity. Some fan favorites, like “The Best Deceptions,” were missing. But although he updated “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most” with lyrics from another emo band, Say Anything, the main thrill of Friday’s concert was hearing how well his best songs have held up. He ended with “Hands Down,” which first appeared on the extended-play disc “So Impossible.” And some fans were still singing the lyrics as they filed out of the building: “My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me/So won’t you kill me?/So I die happy.” Emo stars get old, but full-throated songs about first kisses and last kisses have a way of sticking around.