| City & Colour - Bring Me Your Love |
| Updated: Friday, 17 October 2008 | ||
 City & Colour, the solo project of St. Catharines-born musician Dallas Green, released its sophomore album February 12, 2008, just as the temperature in Ontario plunged deep into the negative double-digits.
The natural flow of the album, folksier than Dallas’ previous work, conjures nothing in my mind except summer and bonfires and great friends staying up late in the night and talking about being young and in love. In fact, the mastering production quality is done so well that it seems as if Dallas himself is sitting on my bed with his guitar. I can hardly be excited about the album because I just keep thinking about winter and cold. This is not winter music. Bring Me Your Love is classic and timeless campfire music that demands that the listener be as warm as the music waves of music circling around her. Despite the success of City & Colour’s first full-length release, I was never totally smitten with it. While I can’t deny that whenever Dallas Green picks up a guitar, the aural artwork that flows from the fret board resonates around me like a welcome friend, I have always found the lyrics to lack a certain depth and heart. The textbook nature of the lyrics left the intricate guitar work a little bare. This can be somewhat seen on Bring Me Your Love's first single, Waiting..., but otherwise Dallas has shown impressive strides in musical ingenuity. Two years and some life lessons have aged Dallas quite well. A newfound level of maturity radiates from his new album, Bring Me Your Love. Clearly not content to rest on his laurels, the strumming and fingering of the six-string is more alluring than ever but this time around. Dallas has clearly thrown his whole heart and soul into the lyrics. Instead of distanced and calculated Top 40-Worthy songs about the road and nameless girls, Bring Me Your Love plays like the listener is getting a sacred peek at the singer’s diaries from the past two years. Buried in the middle of the album is a hidden gem, and my favourite song. Dallas sings The Girl with such stark honesty that I almost feel like I shouldn’t be listening to something so private and intimate. The song starts off slow and folksy as a quiet guitar riff fades into the background and lets the lyrics take the forefront for a change: “You don’t ask for no diamond rings, no elegant string of peals, that’s why I wrote this song to sing my beautiful girl.” The lyrics are so simple and heartfelt that they convey a message of such love that I can’t help but daydream that it had been written with me in mind instead of the obvious intended. The fifth track, Sleeping Sickness, carries some elements of fundamental Canadian rock as Tragically Hip vocalist Gordon Downie lends his vocal chords to the song. The song even sounds like something the Hip could have written. The song is, in fact, so catchy and classic that it begs the question: is Dallas simply copying the Greats, or is 27-year-old on a one-way track to being considered a Great himself?  |
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