REVIEW: City and Colour pretty mellow and moody for an arena concert
Rogers Place was surprisingly packed and loud for City and Colour on Tuesday night – but the arena atmosphere didn’t really lend itself to the cozy intimacy of the performance.
Singer Dallas Green has a beautiful voice, truly melodic. His songs are by turns the haunted notions of a wounded spirit and the hopeful opining of a tender heart. He has a unique singing style. His microphone is positioned at his forehead so he tilts his head upwards to sing, often closing his eyes. His music seems more suited to our beautiful concert halls like the Winspear Centre or the Jubilee Auditorium – but he’s a big star, so it’s hockey arenas in Canada as part of a world tour behind the new album, A Pill For Loneliness.
The set kicked off with the new hit single Astronaut: “Like an astronaut” Green sang, “Above the curvature of the earth, just a wanderer.” For an opener, the song was decidedly downtempo.
The St. Catherine’s Ontario boy knows enough about Alberta to poke a little fun at the audience.
“Thank you Calgary!” is the first thing he said.
He quickly reassured the murmuring crowd that he knows exactly where he is.
For those who don’t know, Green is one of the founders of the hard rock band Alexisonfire, and for his successful solo career created a nom de plume: his first name (Dallas, a city) and his last name (Green, a colour). The band has released six albums to date – and every one of them has found its way to the top of the Canadian charts.
The concert was a three-and-a-half hour marathon of feelings and moody dark tunes – from the emotive singing of his openers Ben Rogers and Jacob Banks to the mixture of full band and acoustic sets by Green.
The crowd was a confusing ratio of Hipsters to Dude-bros. All were very enthusiastic from the floor to the rafters. When Green wailed “Can I get through this?!” in his song Difficult Love, a man in the crowd yelled back “Yeah, we can!” In curiously long pauses between songs, frequent shouts of “I love you!” echoed through the arena. He must still have a lot of followers from his Alexisonfire days. They sure made a lot of noise for an emo concert.
Once, after another long pause, Green came back and joked “Sorry, we were having a team meeting.” He sang one song “about being in a mess you can’t get out of,” followed by another he pegged as “exactly the same issue.”
When it comes to speaking about your reflective, wounded-soul music, Green clearly felt he needed to balance it out with a little self-depreciating humour.
Amongst the new material were old crowd favourites like Save Your Scissors that elicited cheers, and even a sing-along on Northern Wind – a beautiful solo piece where Green stood alone on stage, just him and his guitar.
City and Colour is donating $1 from every ticket sold on this tour to Indspire, an organization that works to build a brighter future for Indigenous students; and to MusiCounts, putting musical instruments into the hands of kids who need them most.
