Album Review: City and Colour - 'The Hurry and The Harm'

Dallas Green of City and Colour is the kind of musician that could spin straw into gold if you asked him to. His time in Alexisonfire gave him the credibility needed to excel on his own, and since its bare beginnings, City and Colour has seized the attention of scattering fans, both likely and unlikely. The Hurry and The Harm is his latest work and it sees Green upping the ante on musical complexities and dipping his toe into slightly darker territory. While we are still graced with his distinctively delicious vocals, there’s something extra about 'The Hurry and the Harm' that both surprises and delights.

'The Hurry and the Harm' begins with its title track, which sets extremely high expectations for the rest of the record. It carries all of City and Colour’s nostalgic charm and softly hypnotic capabilities, achieved mostly by the glistening, lulling vocals of Dallas Green, whose live performances are just as vocally rich and impressive as on his albums. ‘Harder Than Stone’ and ‘Commenters’ transmit a faintly folksier, buoyant personality, coloured with springy, rhythmic percussion and melodic acoustic riffs, that essentially alludes to the beginnings of a range of newfangled and reinvigorated City and Colour sounds that we will see on tracks to come. Nevertheless, ‘Of Space and Time’ and ‘Paradise’ reminds us of that definitive City and Colour archetype, and will be a favorite of those who love the honesty and raw quality of Green’s sing-by-a-camp-fire acoustic songs.

It’s in 'The Lonely Life', however as well as its later counterpart ‘Thirst,’ with their elusively stadium rock tenors and lyrics wrought with sorrow and defeat like ‘gracefully cursed, I thirst’ that sees Dallas Green inject bleaker themes into 'The Hurry And The Harm'. These tracks offer to the record a dash of something extra that may please some listeners or discontent fans of that raw purity that is lost in tracks like these that are more heavily produced. Green’s tranquil vocals certainly sound somewhat erroneous amongst the gaudier and vaster sound of these darker tracks, but in tracks like ‘The Lonely Life,’ his voice adopts a gloomy, melancholy character that works to mesh everything together in a way that is rousing and profoundly affecting.

It’s not surprising then, given Green’s ability to expand the range of his sound, that 'The Hurry and The Harm' manages to combine, sultry, moody tracks like ‘Deaths Song’ and ‘The Golden State,’ which conclude the record, with a newer, heavier sound, and to pull it off in a way that makes sense. While some of the tenderness of his earlier work is somewhat adrift in 'The Hurry and The Harm', City and Colour’s latest sees Dallas Green at his most distinguished and assured.

1. The Hurry and The Harm
2. Harder Than Stone
3. Of Space and Time
4. The Lonely Life
5. Paradise
6. Commentators
7. Thirst
8. Two Coins
9. Take Care
10. Ladies and Gentlemen
11. The Golden State
12. Death’s Song