Album Review: The Hurry and the Harm by City and Colour

With his newest solo album under the moniker of City and Colour, former Alexisonfire singer/guitarist Dallas Green seems to finally have a record that may allow him to garner more widespread recognition as part of this contingent of folk-inspired pop-rock acts—led by the likes of Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers—that seem to be everywhere these days. The album in question, The Hurry and The Harm, delivers a notable, although not terribly surprising, shift in sound for Green. A far cry from his debut album Sometimes, which just consisted of him playing acoustic guitar and piano and singing, nearly every track on The Hurry and The Harm includes some sort of additional background instrumentation.

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Dallas Green says he doesn't care what critics think about his music. From another artist, that might be fronting cliché. But from the guy who left a heavily tattooed post-hardcore band to become a tender singer/songwriter, it seems sincere - he's not concerned with expectations. He does care about songwriting, though, a focus reflected in these 12 tracks of wistful acoustic guitar.

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City and Colour is many things to many different people. Depending on who you ask, the moniker from which Dallas Green releases his solo albums will imaginably conjure a flurry of, “that guy from Alexisonfire”, for his work as the guitarist and background vocalist in the popular post-hardcore band, “Canadian celebrity”, on account of his three platinum-certified albums, equal number of Juno award wins, and of course, his relationship with MuchMusic and So You Think You Can Dance host, Leah Miller. Perhaps most common though, is “acoustic singer-songwriter”, considering the nature of his back catalog.

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Dallas Green – whose recording alias is a result of his own name: a city and a color – spent 2011 recording his third studio album Little Hell while still performing with his post-hardcore act Alexisonfire. He had left the group “secretly” though not “publicly”, i.e., his bandmates were unaware of his plans to kick things down quite a few notches and turn indie-folk full-time. So this year’s The Hurry and the Harm is the first effort to be recorded and released while the Canadian singer-songwriter finds himself with fewer constrictions and fewer limitations.

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Departing Alexisonfire was a bold decision for Dallas Green to make. Not least because in doing so, rather than replacing him, it resulted in the band splitting completely. While the announcement may have come as quite a shock to fans at the time, listening to ‘The Hurry And The Harm’, it’s apparent that his departure was a long time coming.As hinted at on ‘Of Space And Time’, where Dallas noted “there’s an elephant in the back of the room… everyone can see that it looks just like me,” this is an album offering reflection on the process of that decision.

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