Without fuss, but with the firm certainty of evolving in the same line that he began to draw nearly two decades ago, the Canadian Dallas Green returns to teach us a lesson – the seventh under the alter ego of City and Colour– How to create a warm atmosphere capable of combining the closest intimacy with the most grandiose epic. She plays what she is best at, which is to open up and without fuss, dressing up with her most hidden vulnerabilities and demonstrating in each of her new tracks that she could still reach greater levels of intensity in her lyrics. . Because if Green’s tone had always been especially crude, the maturity that she now boasts in “The Love Still Held Me Near” (Still Records, 23) leads us directly to what are probably his wisest and most healing verses, originated by his own need to overcome an unexpected loss and by the consequent and subsequent journey that he undertook.
The fact that he has left behind his horn-rimmed glasses and flannel shirts by virtue of now sporting a thick gray beard and a cracked singer-songwriter hat are not the only signs that alert us to the passage of time in Green’s life. So do his reflections, more solid and introspective than ever, and conscientiously hit by his current life circumstances (“But now that you’re gone and I write down this song I don’t believe this is how it’s meant to be”we heard him cry out in “Meant To Be”) or by a collective climate that invites little or nothing to the most encouraging certainty (“Ghosts are running wild in these empty streets tonight, but here we are together baby, laying side by side”sing in “Fucked It Up”).
Despite looking straight ahead at a story of absolute pain in which its creator has gained awareness of mortality and meditates harshly and from anguish on the irremediable end of days, we also observe that there is some room for hope, because even behind the most obstinate drama Green manages to enliven certain highlights that smack of stadium anthems, turning plaintive and bittersweet rants into fully singable choruses at the top of his lungs (“Treat each day as the gift it is / I don’t wanna keep running until I’m underground”pushes us to scream with him in “Underground”) or showing us the best way to look at the future from the most positive perspective possible (“And there ain’t enough whiskey in this world to ease a tormented mind / So, I’m longing for that place in my dreams where light brings life”, intones in an almost acoustic “Things We Choose to Care About”).
Let’s recognize that few can manage to turn on such a bright light within such hard dissertations, because despite witnessing those days in which he has had to deal with major losses, in “The Love Still Held Me Near” Green lives up to his hopeful title and says goodbye to us with a line that could well solve everything: “It’s been a long time since I’ve felt peace in my mind, but there on the horizon, I can see the light”. A test with few worthy competitors around him of how to generate an overwhelming closeness with the listener, at the blow of blues, Americana and hints of folk with heart.