City And Colour

Bring Me Your Love

[4.5/5]

With artists escaping the shadows cast by their bands with solo endeavors as routine these days as sunburns in summer, you’d almost have to ask: Is it bandwagon bravado or earnest expression? City And Colour are neither. The moniker belongs to Dallas Green, noted Alexisonfire vocalist and guitarist, and his new album, Bring Me Your Love, is a lovelorn paradigm of bottomless creativity. Whereas Green’s mellowness in his “other” band serves to quell the ferocity, on his fourth solo album, it’s splatter-painted like a Pollock, speckled with bits of roots rock, country, folk, punk and classic rock. It’s a menagerie built on subtle but substantive guitar picking, high-registered vocals, picture-perfect imagery and a brutal honesty that throws back to a time when talent meant skills, not studio trickeries. The album opens with a hissing dissonance on “Forgive Me,” setting the tone for an intimate listen. By the time you get to the album’s halfway point, “What Makes A Man?,” you’ve been lulled into a rosy dream. Regardless of the hope or hindrance in Green’s lyricism, it’s smothered in optimism, and Green’s glib vocals act as your buoy in the sea of the world. An inspiring album. (VAGRANT) Ryan Prado



ROCKS LIKE

Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most

Neil Young’s Harvest

Jesse Malin’s The Fine Art Of Self-Destruction

IN-STORE SESSION WITH DALLAS GREEN

Bring Me Your Love is your fourth release as City And Colour. Considering how your first album’s material was written during a lengthy period of time, does it get easier for you as each album comes out?

The first record was kind of never supposed to be anything. It started as an EP I released by myself. We had some time in between Alexisonfire tours, and I wanted to record a couple of songs I had written when I was in high school. Some people heard them and said, “Maybe you should release this.” I decided to record a few more songs and put out a full-length just to see what happened. It was kind of like a “greatest hits” for myself. After I put out the full-length, the attention it gained in Canada was really out of the blue. I never expected anyone to like it; I expected maybe a few kids who liked the band I was in to pick it up, but it grew into something it was never supposed to be. We decided to put a live record out, which wasn’t that big of a deal because we had a whole bunch of stuff recorded from the shows I did, so that was easy. But this record is my chance to make a record how I had always envisioned [making] a record by myself to be.



In what ways did you seize that opportunity in the creation of the new album?

I knew I wanted to get away from the idea of what’s going on with music nowadays, which is that you don’t have to be a talented singer or a good musician anymore-computers take care of all that for you. You don’t even have to write your own songs. I wanted to make a record that sounded like just me sitting there with you, playing these songs for you, as live as possible. Just stripped down and away from computers as much as possible.



How does doing City And Colour fulfill you as an artist in ways that Alexisonfire don’t?

It sort of fulfills that need to just wanna do something [where] you don’t have to answer to anybody. Also, the past year-and-a-half being on tour and being lumped into the whole screamo genre and seeing all the bands that have gotten popular, it was really uninspiring for me to want to play in a rock band. There was a long period of time over the past year where I picked up my guitar and I just couldn’t play or write a heavier riff to save my life. It just wasn’t in me. Having that outlet allowed me to still express myself creatively. I couldn’t think of anything to do, and then finally once I recorded all those songs, I got it out of my head. –Ryan Prado