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In the world of progressive rock, Dallas Green is one of the most proficient musicians at inducing eargasms.
His voice is silky smooth, even while dancing along his breaking point between falsetto and chest voice. He is the driving force behind City and Colour, clearly a riff on the artist’s name. Dallas is a city and green is a color
…get it?
If you look up City and Colour, you are bound to find various lamenting ballads with rich chords and gorgeous melodies. These are the tunes a high school musician would want to learn to impress a girl. But they are also impossible to emulate in order to perform them as well as Dallas Green does. He is the pied piper.
Several of City and Colour’s early releases are one-dimensional, even a tad juvenile. However, Green’s first full-band effort, “Little Hell,” features material that is multi-faceted and brilliant on many levels.
Green has assembled an elite group of musicians to accompany him through the transformation from waddling caterpillar to a soaring, graceful butterfly. The textures explored on the album and the amalgamation of layers that create each song are rich and — pardon the pun — colorful.
The name City and Colour is also fitting for this style of project because Green’s material involves flawlessly interwoven instrumentation like a grid created by a system of city streets.
What many hipsters don’t know is that Green began his career in the realm of hardcore. Alexisonfire was a band that juxtaposed anguished lead vocals with Green’s clear and reverent tenor. Inexplicably, they made it work.
There was no real question why one singer’s voice was so nasty while the other’s voice was so angelic, but the contrast was managed tastefully by Alexisonfire. Green left the group to pursue his own project full-time in 2010.
Alexisonfire officially disbanded in 2011 and although this was a tragic loss for the hardcore music community, what was born from the ashes is the brilliant breed of progressive rock City and Colour offers.
Unlike many artists who attempt projects after their hardcore glory days — for example, Aaron Gillespie’s “The Almost” — City and Colour achieves something that could only be the next progression in an artist’s evolution and maturation.
Green still maintains the tats he adorned himself with during his tenure as Alexisonfire’s clean vocalist. The ink no longer prints the story of Dallas Green, the man who can topple iron giants with his pure and mellifluous voice. His legacy will only be carried in song. I believe the album to define his career will be “Little Hell.”
Canada has made a lot of poor decisions, like chosing the wrong type of bacon to call their own. Their national emblem is an object that necessitates the existence of the leaf-blower, a machine I abhor. However, Canada nurtured young Dallas Green through his angsty, hardcore formative years and the musical world is all the better for it.
Suggested listening:
