Being Green: "The Hurry and the Harm" Album Review | Needle Magazine
Original Publication
No, not easy at all; but with the release of Dallas Green’s new album The Hurry and the Harm on June 2 from Dine Alone Records, long-time fans may notice that he is more at ease with himself than ever before. What began as a side-project, an outlet for the Alexisonfire vocalist’s undiluted sentiment, has matured into the deeply beloved City and Colour we know today. Garnering widespread critical acclaim and numerous awards – including the Juno for Songwriter of the Year in both 2009 and 2011 – one of the most intriguing things about City and Colour is its very sense of journey, of a man in perpetual transit finally accepting himself as a traveller who need never reach a destination. On this new album, you will find a succinct articulation of what has been Green’s greatest gift and curse: “I’ve always been dark with light somewhere in the distance.” With The Hurry and the Harm, it becomes clear that both his darkness and pursuit of a light on the horizon are indispensable to what makes City and Colour so uniquely engaging.
Perhaps some of City and Colour’s particular history can be accounted for by the telltale ‘u’ in the band’s title; there is something distinctly Canadian in how Dallas Green continued with his main band while gently allowing City and Colour to become his primary focus over the course of several years. There are no dramatic tales of Alexisonfire’s members fighting in hotel rooms, hurling insults and HD televisions at one another; in a recent Sacks & Co. interview, Green confesses that while he had felt divided between the two bands since the release of Little Hell in 2011, he still felt obligated to support his band mates. “I wanted to be in one place, but I didn’t want to let my friends down.” The gradual shift in focus, and personal growth, is charted in the development of Green’s lyrics and melody since the release of his first solo album.
Even before Sometimes debuted in 2006, Dallas Green’s mournfully beautiful voice shone noticeably within Alexisonfire’s jagged electric guitar and guttural vocals, like an orphaned archangel adopted by a screamo band. The interplay between George Pettit’s gravelly howl and Green’s clear, soaring voice proved that even within a vicious hormonal hurricane of angst and alienation, many teenagers still crave beauty. This juxtaposition was unique among contemporary bands, and it’s what made City and Colour’s first album an instant success when it dropped, certifying as Gold in March and Platinum by December of the same year, with a sold-out international tour in between. “Save Your Scissors” is known even by non-fans, the video having shot to #1 on MuchMusic’s Powershift Top 30.
For those who feel that the state of popular music in shambles, consider: Sometimes was almost exclusively acoustic and heavily focused on lyrical quality, but it still triumphed over a multitude of pop when Dallas Green earned the best solo artist award from both the Canadian Radio Music Awards and the Indie Awards. He even won the People’s Choice Favourite Canadian Artist at the MuchMusic Video Awards.
Besides being a critical and commercial success, Sometimes explored an unusual meditation on the nature of sadness. Confessing that he often writes sad songs knowing the process will leave him feeling happier, Green’s lyrics and melody hint at the idea of melancholy as its own reward. Though his particular brand of meandering mournfulness is typically dismissed as being unproductive and self-involved, Sometimes initiates an emotional journey that can disprove this assumption.
The most well-known line from the album, “Save your scissors for someone else’s skin”, describes a wound that Green is suffering from but also proactively invested in healing. He’s not sure what exactly is troubling him, but this first album is not attempting to answer that. Instead, it is titled after what one might say when trying to express those directionless desires: “sometimes…” While he frequently expresses frustration at not being able to articulate his feelings, what is unspoken still resonates implicitly in the intimate lyrics and simple melodies.
By Bring Me Your Love, released in 2008, Dallas Green invited many more instruments into the studio: harmonicas, drums, bass, even a mandolin. And as the music acquired new dimensions, his lyrics became correspondingly more complex. Green was much more honest on this second album with himself and fans about his flaws; while Sometimes could easily paint a picture of a tortured, gentle nineteenth century Romantic poet, Bring Me Your Love contains darker confessions of alcohol dependency and unfaithfulness, as well a fear that he may always be this way. However, the desire for redemption is present in every self-rebuke, as well as a need for validity, authenticity, confirmation that all his sadness and yearning has a purpose.
Inner clarity and self-worth seem to matter much more to Green than the album’s swift rise to Platinum status and the success of his first American tour, which sold out six weeks in advance. But by the 2011 release of Little Hell, his most successful album to date, it was beginning to be clear that Green’s genius is fuelled by the very dissatisfaction he longs to escape. Only two Canadian albums went Platinum that year, and Little Hell was one of them. Green’s fanbase was rapidly expanding, but something else may also account for the album’s popularity: these songs were no longer just about himself. Green’s melancholy since City and Colour’s debut had been primarily focused on himself and occasionally a love interest; with Little Hell, he had begun to know his own wounds so well that he could now identify wounds in others and want to help them. He asks himself, “What if I could sing just one song and it might save somebody’s life?”, showing a deep desire for his sadness to have a validating purpose in the world. In “O Sister” he sings to a girl lost inside her own depression, assuring her that it is “a storm she can weather”, and in “Sorrowing Man”, he again turns his internal perceptivity outwards. Spending so many years trying to express his own isolation and dissatisfaction made Dallas Green an expert on it, and a powerful agent in reaching out to the similarly wounded. While this wound still evades articulation, Green seems much more comfortable on Little Hell with confronting it through increasingly complex lyrics and melodies.
Now that Green has officially left Alexisonfire, The Hurry and the Harm will be fans’ first opportunity to get to know a Dallas undivided, focused singularly on City and Colour. The shift is refreshing; never before has Green articulated his sense of unfulfilled searching with such authority or such acceptance, continuing his long-developed themes of searching and sadness with an electrifying lack of sentimentality. “I don’t have a lot of faith in myself, so it is hard for me to have a lot of faith in something I have created,” he says. “But I’ve never been happier or prouder about something that I have done.” The album shows that Green’s wounds have been worthwhile since the very beginning, generating music that contains a healing sadness and a sense of being at peace with one’s own journey, whether it ends or is better left unfinished.