Dine Alone

For his fourth City and Colour outing, Dallas Green has turned up the heat – just a tad. The Hurry and the Harm sports a fuller, more band-centric sound than C&C’s earliest releases, but an acoustic, featherlight touch is still at the root of it all. Green’s wispy falsetto swoops and sashays its way through a dozen songs on the ever-elusive quest for meaning and fulfillment. Not everything on this Nashville-recorded set is airy and shimmery. “Thirst,” with its distortion and thudding beat, hints at a possible departure but it’s a one-off, and Green’s forte remains those folky,
silky melodies – the stirring sound of strummed strings and vocals steeped in longing and seeking. It may not be fair, but City and Colour’s restlessness is, for us, a salve.