City and Colour

Orpheum Theater

May 21, 2008

 

Witnessing a City and Colour show is a unique experience in and of itself. It’s calm, so calm everyone’s still seated. It’s quiet, quiet enough for Dallas to actually hear your shouts. It’s simple, stripped, and straight up memorizing. Dallas Green’s solo project, City and Colour, returned to Vancouver with its sophomore effort Bring me Your Love. This time around Dallas was backed by a band consisting of his friends including Dan Romano, lead singer of Attack in Black, on guitar.

 

A sold out show is quite a welcoming way to kick off a tour, especially for a band that’s never played together before tonight. City and Colour shook out the pre-tour nerves opening the set with “Forgive me”.  Dallas had a good mix of tracks from both records, including the second single “Sleeping Sickness”, “Waiting”, “ Day Old Hate”, “ Sometimes ( I wish)”  “Confessions, and “Hello I’m In Delaware”. The band also exited leaving Dallas onstage strapped with an acoustic guitar for a few tracks including “Save Your Scissors”. 

 

In between tuning his guitar, Dallas bantered with the crowd about random subjects like the Creamy Dill chips backstage, how strange it is to see the audience watch the show through digital cameras, audience members who feel the incessant need to randomly yell obscure, predictable things [ the standard “have my babies!” and “ take your clothes off”  seemed to be pretty popular], mini conferences with band mates, and how happy he was to finally play the beautiful Orpheum Theater, since during his last tour city workers were on strike.    

 

The track “Constant Knot” was one of the high points of the night. Tailored for the live show, Dallas admitted taking audiences into account imagining them singing and clapping to the inviting lyrics and beats, when penning the track. Being the “amazing audience” that Vancouverites are, people happily complied singing off key and clapping out of sync.

 

Dallas ended the night with “As Much as I Ever Could” and the audience finally rose to their feet. For the encore Dallas explained his songwriting process as selfish admitting he tends to write only about himself. However, he stated he wrote the next song for everyone else and dedicated it to “anyone who’s having a bad one…” before kicking into the track with the message of following ones heart, “Against the Grain”.  

 

And finally, just before saying goodbye, a meek Green stood centre stage to express his honest, genuine, gratitude. Stating, despite artist’s generic claims, the audiences support truthfully “means a lot” to him. After Dallas let out his speech, and won the hearts of about thirty more swooning fans, he admitted “takings not [his] strong suit” so he cut the chatter and softly sung “Coming Home”.

 

One of the complaints I had from seeing City and Colour previously, was the lack of variety.  After a while, everything started to blend together, it was too much of the same thing. However, with the release of Bring Me Your Love, Dallas blends elements of folk music along with the addition of different instruments, and faster tempos, making it much more enjoyable. My only complaint now- I still haven’t seen “In the Water I’m Beautiful” live.