Now eight years after the first time Dallas Green stepped back from Alexisonfire for a minute and quietly began his solo career with City and Colour, it can safely be said that while the singer is capable of being terribly over-wrought and self-indulgent in his music (both Sometimes and Bring Me Your Love are about as close to naval-gazing as it's possible to get while holding an acoustic guitar), he has honed his songwriting talent carefully and beautifully over time (see Little Hell for the beginnings of a bold experience), and grown nicely into the praise he has garnered. The best exhibition of Dallas Green as songwriter and artist of music to date exists in the twelve songs which comprise The Hurry and The Harm. On his fourth full-length solo album, Green's talent has had time to season and mature and, even after having already enjoyed so many successes, he's grown confident enough to finally let his talents shine, without anything obscuring them.
Green's exhibition of seasoned strength begins immediately as The Hurry and The Harm's title track gently leads the album in, and listeners won't be able to miss the confident and classic sound in the sway of the song. Unlike all of the other albums Green has released under the City and Colour moniker, “The Hurry and The Harm” showcases a genuine soul and forward movement immediately; unlike the reasonably stale and sophomoric high school poetry which was featured in the lyric sheets of all the songs on the first two City and Colour albums, lines like “Everyone wants everything no matter the cost/ We're longing to live in a dream/ But we can't let go of all that we think we know/ This great escape until we give up the ghost” really can capture imaginations – and do it with fine craft instead of trite, poppy posturing.
The sudden shift expressed by “The Hurry and The Harm” truly feels like the emergence of an incomparable sound and voice, and it's exhilarating – but that seemingly spontaneous development doesn't just stay confined to the first track on the album, it spreads quickly. The fine alt-folk moments just pour forth from songs like the deep pocket-dwelling “Of Space And Time,” the lugubrious but spry “The Lonely Life” (which mourns “The lonely life of a writer/ Whose words could not pay his debts”), the lean, menacing and aggressive “Thirst” (which really stands out because of the visceral, comparatively rock-infused bent of it too) and the dark, harrowing rumination of the vicissitudes of life which manifests in “Ladies and Gentlemen” with perfect ease and stunning quality. Those tracks all scream for attention but, even more impressive than the songs, it's remarkable how well all of the different angles from which Green approaches them hold the album together; while while the singer's previous albums featured a stylistic tendency to run a single sound into the ground with repetitive use, the dozen songs on The Hurry and The Harm each come through fresh in emotional center center, style and approach, which makes for a consistently striking and captivating experience.
Because of the sudden shift out of what has been the convention for Dallas Green on The Hurry and The Harm, listeners will have an incredibly hard time not getting excited by the album. While it could be argued that Little Hell saw Green reaching out for a unique sound and persona that he could call his own, he has actually grasped that form on The Hurry and The Harm and, from it, turned out a dozen songs which stand peerless in their quality both from his own songbook as well as that of any other artist who may be considered his peer.
Artist:
www.cityandcolour.com/
www.myspace.com/dallasgreen
www.facebook.com/cityandcolour
www.twitter.com/cityandcolour
Album:
The Hurry and The Harm is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
