The Review - City in Colour - If I Should Go Before You
Album number five from the Dallas Green led City and Colour, "If I Should Go Before You", arrived this week. The editor’s notes in Apple Music give the album this poignant one sentence review “Dallas Green’s master class in heartfelt songwriting”. That one sentence just about sums up this record perfectly. It’s the best City and Colour album to date and feels like we’ve been building up to this moment with Dallas all along.
It’s exciting to hear a Canadian musician continue to grow, mature, find his voice and consistently put out engaging music. To start an album with a 9-minute epic (Woman) would seem self-indulgent but in this current album setting it completely works to set the stage for the 10 songs to follow. Even Dallas admits in a recent CBC Music interview that this song is indeed for him:
“Indulgent is the perfect word. The only thing you’re missing is the word self. Because that song is 100 per cent for me. It started out just a soundcheck jam and I never thought it would become anything and then I figured out a vocal line to go over it and then I was like, okay, this has to be something. We started playing it in my house and we had our 30-minute version of it, and I was like, okay, that’s great. It could be its own little thing, we could record it and put it out.
There’s this band Sleep that I really like and they’re a stoner metal band, they have a record called Jerusalem, which was one song, 40 minutes long, and they got dropped from their label and then had to re-release it under a different name. I love it. It’s one song and it’s an hour long and we could do that! We started recording in the studio and I was like, if we get this to 10 minutes, I’m putting it on the record. At that point, I didn’t think I was going to start the record with it. Once I sequenced it in my head, I though, okay, we’ll put it last, the big, epic closer, whatever, but I put it last and it just didn’t make any sense. But I tried it first and it seemed like a perfect intro to the record.”
Dallas is quick to pick up the momentum from the jam filled opener with ‘Northern Blues,’ a song that plods along perfectly with a catchy backbone beat and Green’s pitch perfect vocals.
‘Wasted Love’ is the catchiest song Dallas has written since ‘Sleeping Sickness’ and I could hear it as a modern rock radio staple for a long time.
(Side note: seeing City and Colour open for Neil Young last week and hearing the first notes of Sleeping Sickness, I was hopeful Neil would be popping up on stage to handle the Gord Downie parts of the song…sadly my hopes went unfulfilled).
To me this is a country blues record with themes of lost love and sadness but at the same time it has a sound of optimism. The songs shine on their own as singles, but also flow together as a whole record even better.
The stripped down quiet song ‘Blood’ closes the album. An unnamed female singer joins Dallas and the two of them bring the album to a picturesque close with the lyrics “Now I know there’s beauty buried beneath // The surface of what we seek”.
Heartfelt songwriting indeed.
Tracks
1. Woman 2. Northern Blues 3. Mizzy C 4. If I Should Go Before You 5. Killing Time 6. Wasted Love 7. Runaway 8. Lover Come Back 9. Map Of The World 10. Friends 11. Blood
City and Colour - Woman
City and Colour - Wasted Love