City & Colour – Bring Me Your Love
  1. City & Colour
  2. Bring Me Your Love
  3. Vagrant Records
  4. myspace.com/dallasgreen

City & Colour – Bring Me Your Love

Bringing along a full band this time around, the songs on Bring Me Your Love are much fuller and are more likely to keep your attention all the way through than those of City & Colour’s debut, Sometimes, which gave Dallas Green an outlet for his beautiful use of his singing voice and an acoustic guitar, in contrast his normal musicality as lead vocalist of the Canadian screamo/post-hardcore band Alexisonfire.

With the help of percussion, harmonica, backing vocals, bass, and even the occasional riff on an electric guitar, Dallas takes the sad sound of City & Colour and makes it a little brighter. In an interview with Taking Over, Dallas said, “I think the first record is so slow, and you can really tell that they’re sort of melancholic type songs or depressing or whatever. But the newer songs, I think there’s still some really sad lines in those songs, but I like to think there’s a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel in the new songs.”

And when dealing with topics like death, sleeplessness, broken relationships, alcoholism and more, that glimmer of light is certainly needed. The record talks about a variety of deep issues which can all be summed up as the search for meaning.

In each and every song, there is a broken man in a broken world looking to make sense out of all of it. And that is why for me this is such an incredible album, because the struggle is so real, because it’s something that cuts straight to the heart of our existence. In essence, it is the Christian walk.

This struggle for meaning in the lyrics makes listening to Bring Me Your Love a spiritual experience for me. Few lyricists can talk about this in such a relatable and passionate way, but Dallas Green pulls it off, which is only one of the reasons this is such a great record. The music is brilliantly crafted indie-folk with influences ranging from bluegrass (“Body in a Box”) to jazz (“As Much as I Ever Could”), and his crisp, somber voice fits perfectly throughout and is, in my opinion, really what makes the band.