City and Colour - Sometimes (10-Year Retrospective)

"God, I still remember the first time I heard it."

Every time I press play on a new album, somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm hoping that I'll be saying those words 10 years down the line. Some people want their sports teams to win the league title. Some people want their favorite movies to break box office records. I want to have the albums I listen to become more than albums. I want them to become catalogs of life moments.

For years, I've been told that, as you get older, you have fewer of those moments as a music fan, and that it's important to cherish them when they happen, because eventually they'll stop happening. I haven't reached that point in my music listening journey yet, thankfully. But I also know that I'll probably never connect with another album in quite the same visceral fashion that I did with City and Colour's Sometimes in the summer of 2008. And frankly, I hope I don't have occasion to.

It's a bizarre thing about nostalgia, particularly when it's linked to records about heartbreak and loneliness. In theory, falling in love with your best friend, having it go nowhere, and then losing her in the fallout should be a time you'd rather forget. It's certainly not something I want to relive: not the feeling of rejection, or that aching pain in a heart that wants something so badly, but knows it can never have it. I don't want to relive the night she told me why she was dodging my calls, why she had to dodge my calls so that we wouldn't break each other's hearts any more than we already had. I don't really want to think about how I went into that summer assuming she'd be a lifelong friend and exiting it wondering if we were even still friends at all. And yet, I still love Sometimes, the album that brings it all flooding back like no time has passed at all, the album that puts that aching pain back in my heart and forces me to relive everything one more time.

Because God, I can still remember the first time I heart it. I remember the first time I heard Dallas Green yelping "Can I have you?" at the end of "Like Knives" and getting chills down my spine because I felt like the song had been written for me in that specific moment. I remember driving home from work at midnight one night in July, listening to him take that "Hello, I'm in Delaware" refrain into chest voice on the final chorus, and hearing my own voice crack as I got choked up trying to sing along. I remember hearing that line in "Off By Heart," that cautionary line that goes "The stars are aligned, but they don't align for us," and thinking that it had to be wrong, that it couldn't apply to me and her. And I remember wading through the despairing hopelessness of "Day Old Hate" and knowing it was finally time to face reality.

My story isn't unique. I fell for a friend, a girl who wasn't available, but who may or may not have had feelings for me as well. We started the summer incredibly close and only got closer as the nights got longer and more unpredictable. Eventually, she distanced herself from me to save her relationship and I receded into music for comfort. By the time she left for college at the end of the summer, everything had changed between us. It was something that needed to happen: heartbreaks change us, show us who we are, help us grow up. Even if I had gotten what I wanted, we probably would have imploded under the strain of long distance, or worse, the strain of being at two very different places in life. She was starting college and dealing with all of the excitement and change that comes with that. I still had one more year left of high school. We were damned if we did and damned if we didn't.

A part of me knew all of this the day she left. That's why I look back on the summer of 2008 as when I finally stopped being a kid and learned how to deal with loss and failure and rejection. I would need those skills in the years to come, as I tried to pursue a college major that I wasn't cut out for. Even though I'd never really had a serious relationship before, that summer would also give me the maturity that I would need to make a different long-distance relationship work two years later. After you get your heart broken the first time, I think it gives you clarity, a sense of knowing what you want in your personal life. Gaining that knowledge at 17 was a very good thing. Two years later, when the right girl came along, I was ready for her, and smart enough to recognize a chance that I didn't want to let slip away.

Another part of me needed help and support for the sadness that comes with saying goodbye for good, though. Music provided that. There were a lot of records and songs that seemed to come into my life that summer to prop me up and keep me going. Safetysuit's Life Left to Go, a sorely underrated record from a great pop-rock band, was a major one. Third Eye Blind's "Motorcycle Drive-By" and Iron & Wine's "Fever Dream" played very important roles at very important moments in my not-quite love story. Jack's Mannequin's The Glass Passenger leaked the day she left, a coincidence that still elevates how I feel about that record to this day. But the biggest one was undoubtedly Sometimes, an album whose sad, spartan acoustic breakup songs sounded larger than life on late-night, muggy August drives through the back roads of my hometown.

As with Everything in Transit, I was late to the party with Sometimes. As with Everything in Transit, my tardiness was a serendipitous turn of fate. This record released on November 1st, 2005, when I was a freshman in high school. I think I always would have enjoyed it, but had I discovered it at release, I never would have quite gotten what Dallas Green was going through. There were albums that made sense for me to be listening to when I was adjusting to a new school and to the angsty awkwardness of my early high school years, and Sometimes wasn't one of them.

I was and am convinced that some higher power was holding off on delivering Sometimes to my ears until I really needed it. The record was almost three years old when I found it languishing in the dark corners of a friend's iPod and pushed play. When I did, I knew instantly that it was going to play an important role for me. I just didn't know how important.

Sometimes isn't a perfect record. The lesser songs, particularly "In the Water I Am Beautiful," sound amateurish and immature, like a kid playing songs in his bedroom on his first guitar. And "Comin' Home," though solid enough as a song about touring life, gets a bit too much mileage out of just listing geographic locations, a la Red Hot Chili Peppers. But the moments that lock in on this record aren't just among my favorite songs Dallas Green has ever written, or that this "scene" has ever produced; they're among my favorite songs ever.

"Hello, I'm in Delaware" is Green's finest work. Despite the song having a title that doubles as a Wayne's World reference, one of my college friends and I would always talk about how "Delaware" was just about the saddest song ever written. If "Comin' Home" is a solid song about touring life, "Delaware" might be the best song about touring life, give or take a "Faithfully." It's a song about being on the road, miles away from the person you love, and wondering if your relationship can survive until you get a chance to see one another again. When Dallas sings "My body aches, and it hurts to sing, and no one is moving/And I wish that I weren't here tonight, but this is my life" on the bridge, it captures the weariness and resignation that inevitably comes, at some point, in every doomed relationship. Sure, "Delaware" is a song specifically written about the downside of being a touring musician, but the emotions it describes are universal.

There's a tendency among some listeners to avoid the songs or albums they associate with hard times or painful memories. A great website called Ruined Music was built around this concept toward the tail end of the last decade. (If you haven't read it, you should.) But I've rarely felt the need to turn my back on songs that soundtracked the rougher parts of my life. Sure, I can't listen to Sometimes without my chest contracting and my heart twisting in the most bittersweet way imaginable. And yeah, I can't listen to the pop-heartbreak cocktail of "Save Your Scissors" or the desolate acoustic guitar work of "Day Old Hate" without being transported back to those northern Michigan summer nights. The songs on this record still convey to me both the hopeful naivety of young love and the crushing depression of a broken heart, and I assume they always will.

But listening to this record today doesn't hurt me or make me wish things had gone differently. I have the life I have today because of what I learned that summer. Instead, Sometimes is a reminder to me of how music can save your life when you are at your most vulnerable. It's also a reminder of how much a songwriter can accomplish just by telling the truth. Dallas Green is a great vocalist, a talented melodist, and a skilled orchestrator of full-band textures, as evidenced by his last few albums. But he's never quire been able to recapture the heights of the raw and bare-bones Sometimes, simply because he's never again dared to be quite so honest.

City and Colour - If I Should Go Before You

At this point, my love for City and Colour's debut album, the 2005 bummer parade that was Sometimes, is fairly well documented. It's hard for me to write about that album or any of the music from singer/songwriter Dallas Green in a way that is logical or rational, just because that first record was so, so personal to me. Sometimes turns 10 this year, and I haven't even decided whether or not I want to open that can of worms for a decade retrospective. Suffice to say that some things are better being left in the past. Yet here I am anyway, putting pen to paper for Dallas Green's fifth album under the City and Colour moniker, simply because some musical bonds never fade.

The album in question, called If I Should Go Before You, is something I wish wholeheartedly that I enjoyed more. I don't tend to be someone who bashes a band or artist for not making the same record twice, and I genuinely do respect Dallas Green for taking his City and Colour project away from the acoustic confessionals of Sometimes and toward different avenues. His last album, 2013's The Hurry and the Harm, was a criminally underrated venture that tackled Laurel Canyon folk influences in a very pleasing way. This new album places the lens instead on Nashville, and comes out as Green's most countrified work yet. These are all things that I should enjoy, particularly since two-thirds of my top 30 albums this year will probably be from the country, folk, or Americana genres.

But Green, who briefly regained the ability to move me with Hurry after making his worst album with 2011's Little Hell, seems to have mostly missed my wavelength once again with If I Should Go Before You. With Sometimes, Green was a guy who wrote and sang songs almost completely built on pathos. The production was sparse, the arrangements were entirely acoustic, and Green's angelic tenor voice had a roughness to it that's been lost with the glossy albums he's been making since. On a lot of levels, Sometimes wasn't anything special: just an album that some heartbroken kid could have written and recorded in his bedroom. It was like a sadder, darker, and more Canadian version of Swiss Army Romance.

But those songs fucking hit, man. They cut like knives. Or scissors. Or both, to reference a pair of the album's best songs. When I listen back today, that album still makes my heart beat a little bit faster, just because the raw emotions of those songs captured so perfectly what I was feeling at a certain time. On one hand, it would be impossible for me to ever connect with another City and Colour album on that level again. Just like I know Jimmy Eat World will never hook me quite like they did with Futures, just like I know Andrew McMahon will never quite recapture the magic of Everything in Transit, I know that Sometimes was so important during a specific moment of my life that Green can't feasibly top it, at least not for me.

Unfortunately, If I Should Go Before You often makes me feel like Green isn't even trying to top it. Sometimes killed me because, when I heard the lyrics, I repeatedly found myself in disbelief at the words he was singing and the way he was singing them. They felt honest. Unguarded. Lived in. Here, we get a constant parade of lazy, clichéd rhymes that feel like cardboard cutout versions of the genuine emotions Dallas was singing about on Sometimes. "Crying out for more, just a little more/Tied down to the floor like a prisoner of war," he sings on "Wasted Love." "Finally free from the past/How long could a feeling like this last?" he mewls on the repetitious "Runaway." "Bound for trouble from the start/I've been walking through this old world in the dark," he croons on "Lover Come Back." This is high school-level poetry with no depth, but worse than that, it's lost the lived-in feel that made the Sometimes songs special.

To be fair, Green has never exactly been Sam Beam. He's always written lyrics with simple, predictable rhyme schemes and blunt, easy-to-interpret themes. But when he sang something like "My body aches, and it hurts to sing, and no one is moving/And I wish that I weren't here tonight/But this is my life" in "Hello, I'm in Delaware," it had this piercing desperation to it that made it sound like Dallas was going to explode if he didn't get those words out. In contrast, most of the songs on If I Should Go Before You feel like trinkets that he sat down and wrote in 20 minutes.

The best thing that can be said for the majority of this record is that it sounds great. It's not difficult to see why Green enjoys working with the full band, and this record might host his most gorgeous arrangements yet. From the surging George Harrison-style guitars of "Lover Don't Come Back" or the admittedly wonderful "Mizzy C," to the whining pedal steel on "Friends," there are a slew of gorgeous musical moments on this album. Even on the weak songs—like the bland, hookless "Killing Time"—the electric guitar work is downright explosive.

The problem is, Green's songwriting here simply isn't up to par with the artists he's trying to imitate. Alt-country—the genre to which If I Should Go Before You most accurately belongs—is a genre built on strong lyricism and storytelling. Neither are present for the majority of this record, and the result is an album that pales in comparison to what it should be. As such, the Nashville sound—while it suits Green, his voice, and his musicality well enough—ends up doing him a disservice, simply because I can't imagine a time when I'm going to reach for this album instead of a more lyrically revealing album from the same genre. Recent records from guys like Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, and Will Hoge feature similar sonic and musical touches, but delve deeper lyrically and beat Dallas in the one area in which he used to most excel: emotion.

Still, it's tough to write off If I Should Go Before You entirely, if only for the strength of its final track. After spending most of the album going full tilt on the full-band thing—occasionally indulgently so, as on the disastrous nine-plus-minute album opener, "Woman"—Green finally goes back to basics on track 11. The song, a spartan acoustic lullaby called "Blood," is reminiscent of Sometimes in all of the best ways. Evocative, atmospheric, aching, and beautiful, "Blood" is a perfect song, and it proves that—when he's not phoning it in—Dallas Green can still write material that provides a well-placed punch to the gut.

I don't want to just come right out and say that Dallas Green should make another stripped down acoustic record, since it's clear from his past three album that he's passionate about making music with a full band. "Blood" also isn't the only good song on If I Should Go Before You. The aforementioned "Mizzy C" might have one of Green's catchiest choruses; "Lover Come Back" is solid '90s-style folk-pop; "Wasted Love" is a guitar-driven dynamo—even despite a rather grating chorus; and "Friends" has a dusky highway-bound feel to it that makes it a fitting penultimate track. But "Blood" makes it abundantly clear that just about every hallmark of Green's music—his delicate tenor voice, his plainspoken lyrics, his haunting vocal melodies, the reverb-heavy production style—is better suited to sparse acoustic recordings than to big full-band arrangements. Just like "Take Care" from the last record, it's not a coincidence that the best song on this album is the one that most closely recalls the way Dallas Green used to make music. And that's the thing about being a City and Colour fan: I want to appreciate Green's new stylistic directions, but it's hard to do when he keeps serving up reminders of how good he can be when he works with less.

City and Colour - The Hurry and the Harm

A corridor of darkness wraps around my car as it shoots down some county two-line road on the backstreets of town. There’s no one else around, no one but me, my blue beater of a Chevrolet, and the sounds pouring out of my stereo. It’s the summer of 2008, my first summer with a car, my first summer since my siblings moved out, my first summer with any semblance of freedom or responsibility, and it’s both the best and worst season of my life. I’m driving home from work at a job I hate and it’s midnight. I could call my friends and see what they’re doing, but chances are that most of them have either stayed at their houses too late for their parents to let them leave or are too many drinks in to register my call. I could also call her: the girl who used to be my best friend, the girl I’ve spent the past six weeks falling for, head over heels, but I know she won’t answer either. So I let my phone lay dormant at my side and I just drive. I drive and I turn up the stereo, and I listen to the strains of an acoustic guitar and a desolate voice as they nourish my wounds or cut them deeper. Or maybe they're doing both. Truth is, I’m not sure which side of the pain I’m on anymore. All I know is this: when I walk into my house tonight, I’ll immediately want to leave it. I’ll feel pathetic and lonely and miserable for spending another night alone in my bedroom, even if the actual “night” is already gone and going anywhere else right now would just be stupid. But in the 10 or so miles between my workplace and my front door, with the music coursing through me and the brisk night air flicking through my hair, I feel more alive than I’ve felt in weeks. This is my stronghold, my bulletproof vest, my Fortress of Solitude. So instead of turning right and driving straight home, I turn left and take the long way. These songs aren’t done with me yet.

That was me on one of the many, many nights where City and Colour’s debut album, the gorgeously elegiac Sometimes, served as my primary soundtrack. For whatever reason, I never heard of Dallas Green before that summer, the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, where I lost myself in a haze of adolescent longing, sad songs, and endless, sweltering, alcohol-drenched nights. Sometimes, which consists almost solely of Green’s flawless tenor voice, a bucket of reverb, and a lone acoustic guitar, had actually released nearly three years earlier, on Halloween 2005. But as serendipity would have it, Sometimes, the single most depressing break-up album I've ever heard in my life, didn’t make its way onto my iPod until the last day of my junior year, just in time to lend its mournful voice to my own doomed romance and my own bout with blistering heartbreak. I’m still trying to figure out if that was the record that kept me alive or the record that plunged me deeper into my own sadness than I ever wanted to go. Either way, what those listens did, those late nights spent shouting along to the climax of "Hello, I'm In Delaware" at the top of my lungs, was assure me of two things: first, that my childhood was over; and second, that I would never be able to view the music of City and Colour in rational terms again.

It’s taken me a solid week to write this review because, for a long time, I just didn’t know what I wanted to say. By the time I was listening to Sometimes on those late summer nights, the second City and Colour record—2008’s Bring Me Your Love—was already out. 2011 brought another one, Little Hell, but to me, they might as well have been written by a different person. Green’s angelic tenor was still there, but I felt like there was something about the raw, emotional, bruising power of Sometimes that he was never going to be able to duplicate again. And I’m not sure I wanted him to duplicate it either, since hearing Sometimes still has the power to stop me in my tracks and make my stomach and chest feel like they’re about to burst. But Little Hell especially struck me as hollow and sterile. It seemed like Green had traded the emotion of his music for slick production values and unnecessary new layers, and while the songs sounded great, they meant nothing. At least to me.

The Hurry and the Harm restores my faith in the Canadian singer-songwriter, and it doesn’t do it by dropping the direction of the last few records or going back to the spartan arrangements of Sometimes. No, The Hurry and the Harm works because, at last, the layers and smooth production elements feel like they’re natural ingredients within the music rather than additions that Green tacked on in the studio just because he could. Take the gorgeous alt-country slide guitars on the title track, the mountainous bass beneath “Harder Than Stone,” the dreamy ambiance surrounding “Of Space and Time,” or the plentiful flourishes of pedal steel that appear constantly throughout the record. Almost unanimously, it’s hard to imagine these songs without the muscular arrangements and nuanced layers Green has outfitted them with.

One of my biggest issues with the City and Colour project is the inconsistency of the albums it has produced. Even Sometimes, a record I count among my all-time favorites, has at least two misfires. Bring Me Your Love, meanwhile, contained a handful of great songs, but suffered from a scattershot tracklist that lacked any semblance of flow, theme, or uniformity. And Little Hell was plagued by Green’s poorest songwriting to date and by a series of bizarre arrangements that didn’t always fit the songs to which they were attached. From start to finish, The Hurry and the Harm feels far more organic and fully-realized. Where Bring Me Your Love could have been a demo tape or a b-sides collection, this record bears a consistency and polish in sound and feel that is unprecedented in the City and Colour catalog. For the first time since the debut, it really feels like Green hashed out a start-to-finish album rather than just a set of disconnected songs, and that fact makes all the difference.

That’s not that there aren’t weak tracks here: penultimate number “The Golden State” is pleasant enough, but gets derailed by lyrics that could have been ripped straight from a California tourism brochure, while “Death’s Song” ends the album on a disappointingly repetitious note. But even with its whimper of a conclusion, The Hurry and the Harm feels like the most complete album Green has ever released under the City and Colour moniker. There’s a pleasant west coast, Mellow Mafia feel to these songs, not unlike the territory that John Mayer mined so successfully on last year’s Born and Raised, and it’s absolutely blissful. During the record’s best songs—namely the first five tracks and the deliriously radiant lullaby that is “Take Care”—you can almost feel the warm breeze of Malibu nights, the gentle caress of its waves, the slight mist of the sea water as a warm breeze tosses it off the ocean and into your face. There are moments throughout the record that risk more: the distorted buzz-saw guitar riff of “Thirst,” for instance, or the pitch-black “Two Coins,” which repurposes the intro chords of Sometimes “Like Knives” as the roots of a cinematic thriller. But as has always been the case with City and Colour, this record is at its best when it forgoes sonic evolution for the bare bones simplicity of human emotion and the warm, gentle wash of pleasant nostalgia. Less about the hurry, you might say. More about the harm.

Jim Ivins - Late Night Drive EP

Jim Ivins - Late Night Drive EP

Unsigned, 2012

Four stars

Virginia singer/songwriter Jim Ivins has been making the rounds in the music industry for a few years now, both as a solo artist and as the frontman for the Jim Ivins Band. He's opened for the likes of the Ataris, Parachute and the Rocket Summer, draws influence from Jon Foreman and Ryan Adams, and is buddies with scene hero Ace Enders: not a bad list of names to be associated with. His latest work is an EP entitled Late Night Drive, a terrific set of acoustic based songs with topics ranging from growing up, love (both lost and found), heartbreak and death, that will surely become the soundtrack for the night drives it's title suggests. Right from the first moment of the first track, when forcefully strummed guitar chords came cascading out of my speakers, I was reminded of City and Colour's album Sometimes. That record is still probably the saddest album I've ever heard, and from the very outset, Late Night Drive occupies the same territory of strangely comforting melancholia, though Jim Ivins bears less vocal similarity to Dallas Greene than he does to the likes of Chris Carrabba or Ace Enders himself. The opening track, entitled "Love's Like Snow," introduces everything, starting with a single guitar before the entrance of Ivins' soothing, falsetto laden vocals, and it's wintery, moody tone, sets the atmosphere for the album quite well. The exquisite "Riptides," is even better, showcasing some nice guitar work and one of the strongest choruses on the album, while bells accent parts of the song and add to the ambiance nicely.

The title track follows, this time with a synth line to accompany Ivins' strums. "What is it about the night that makes us think about the things we've lost?" Ivins sings on the chorus, with wistful and nostalgic delivery. Music often hits me the hardest on lonely late night drives home, after an evening out with friends or spent at my girlfriend's house: there's something about playing records at full volume, alone in a car on a dark road that makes them ring with clarity and come alive. The songs on Late Night Drive seem to come directly from that place, and that's something that hit me hard right away. There's a strangely meditative, healing power in drives like that, and that theme cuts through every song on this EP. "Twilight," the following track, comes from a very similar place. It's a mostly piano based number with a killer vocal melody and some of Ivins' most heartbreaking lyrics, born from a relationship at it's end. "Fighting with your present because it won't become your past/Memories are for suckers who couldn't make it last," he croons on the song's bridge, bolstered by some well-placed back-up vocals. The sparse acoustic atmosphere works very well for most of these songs, and "Twilight" is terrific as is, but I feel like there's a better song in there that doesn't quite make it's way out in this arrangement. There's potential for a truly epic, bruising build to that song, a crescendo that's not quite possible with this limited instrumentation and production. It's hard to complain about a song this good, but I would be thrilled to see it done in a bigger fashion.

Ivins saves the best for last with "House of Three," a viscerally moving number that serves as an ode to his mother, who passed away last year. The EP feels like a progression, like every musical and personal moment Ivins has had across the previous four songs have built to this one piece of perfection. Ivins gives his most emotional performance on the album, understandably, and it comes across in both his vocal performance and in his guitar playing, especially in the cathartic chorus. "I don't want to have my memories/'Cause I don't need reminding that they're all that's left until eternity," he states on the verse, looking back at a lifetime of glorious moments with a person who departed from his life far too soon. He considers driving away and trying to escape it all, but by the end of the song, he seems resigned to the fact that he's lost something that no number of late night drives could ever heal, and that the pain he is feeling will probably never fully wash away. Ivins is a strong singer and a songwriter, and it shows on every track on this album, but this one is simply in another class. It's probably one of the four or five best songs I've heard all year, and it would be a shame for Ivins not to get the recognition he deserves for it.

Late Night Drive is a solid EP from a promising young singer/songwriter that I will most certainly be following from here on out. He writes relatable songs with heart and talent, and performs them with passionate emotional force. Ivins reminds me, in many ways, of some of my favorite artists ever, artists whose music came alive on the late night drives he sings about here, and although he's not going to make his way into their ranks just yet, his ability to evoke those thoughts in me is nothing to laugh about, nor is the fact that this EP closes with one of the most gorgeously perfect songs I've heard in awhile. I can only hope I hear a lot (or at least a few) more of those from him down the road.

Sleepy Turtles - Summer, Hither

Sleepy Turtles - Summer, Hither

Autumn + Colour Records, 2012

3.5 Stars

Fans of modern folk acts like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and My Morning Jacket, take note. Summer, Hither, a new EP from the Atlanta-based (and amusingly named) Sleepy Turtles. Right from the first song, the harmony-drenched title track, it's clear that these guys owe a lot to similar bands who have blazed a similar trail in recent years. But while their sound may not be terribly distinctive, it's still as appealing as ever, and Summer, Hither, standing at a short-but-sweet five tracks and twenty minutes, is a more than promising career-starter. The harmonies prove to be the norm throughout the EP, surrounding frontman Dylan Higgins' soft and welcoming croon with a sweet swell of sonic bliss. The instrumentation adds another dimension, with softly strummed acoustics, nostalgic banjo plucking, and occasional flourishes of electric and steel guitar. Mostly though, Summer, Hither plays things straight, offering up five quick (and stupendously enjoyable) tracks of traditional folk that straddles the line between Americana and Appalachian heritage.

But that's not to call the Sleepy Turtles limited. Where the first three tracks dwell in a similar sunsoaked, acoustic vein (befitting the album's title), "Reason to Hope" throws a wrench into the machine, twisting in a haunting and apocalyptic web that is certain to enrapture many a listener. Higgins sounds like a cross between Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody and modern folk hero Sam Beam here, and the song's evocative and elegiac plucking wouldn't have been out of place on an early Iron & Wine album: it's an instant highlight, but then, with five tracks this good, nothing falls out of context. Closer "Being Small" kicks off in a decidedly simpler and gentler vein, just a single guitar and Higgins' voice, before the song begins to build. Mandolin strokes add subtly to the texture as an ensemble of singers begins to gather around the song's melody. Drums and handclaps enter only seconds later, with competing vocal lines combining for a communal and classic folk sound that ends only just as the song is nearing sublime territory. It's a jarring finale to a musical project that, from the first song, feels like it should be a piece of something larger. And perhaps it will be: with the massive popularity that their influences have gained in recent years, perhaps the Sleepy Turtles will be able to make an impression: they certainly have the talent.

There's not a lot else to say here: these guys do what they do and they do it very well. There's not a weak song in the bunch, and, despite the fact that the collection never adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts (I find that EPs rarely do, for me), that's hardly a mark against its pleasant, dusky lilt. Higgins is a collection of his idols, sounding like a clone of Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold at the start, and hitting upon shades of guys like Dallas Greene (City & Colour) and William Fitzsimmons before ultimately settling on Iron & Wine for the final two tracks. But while Sleepy Turtles don't really make an attempt to strike out on their own or reinvent the wheel like Bon Iver did last summer, the songs are good enough for it not to matter, and any folk fan should be more than willing to spend the twenty minutes it will take to check these guys out. Sleepy Turtles are a band to watch for on the folk horizon, and I am excited to see where they go from here. If the near-epic ambition that "Reason to Hope" hints at is anything to go by, this is a band who would be far more at home in a full album setting, with room for their arrangements to expand and their songs to breathe. If given that opportunity (preferably sooner rather than later), I think they could have something really breathtaking to offer; I'll be keeping close tabs on them to see if they can make good on that promise.

The Tower & The Fool - How Long

The Tower & The Fool - How Long

Run For Cover Records/Earshot Media, 2012

4.5 stars

Every once in awhile, an album comes along, out of nowhere, and just stops you in your tracks. It's a rare but beautiful thing when you can listen to a record for the first time, completely free of all expectations, and have it knock you down. Last year, a pair of records landed in my top ten from artists that I had known nothing about prior to my first listen: the first was Charlie Simpson's Young Pilgrim, a gorgeous folk-pop effort that was right up my alley from the get-go. The second was Mansions' Dig Up the Dead, an emotionally intense set of break-up songs that wormed its way into my consciousness as the year moved on until I couldn't ignore it: I expect that a similar fate will befall How Long, the excellent full-length debut from Rhode Island-based rock band The Tower & The Fool, a break-up album that encompasses some of the best melodies, the most emotional vocals, and the most stunningly heartbreaking lyrics that I've heard all year (or, perhaps, all decade). 

In the realm of musical statements, I find a well-executed break-up album to be among the most fascinating. Undoubtedly, some of the greatest art of all time has been the product of personal disaster. When artists let the world in to see them bleed, put all of themselves and their lives into a musical work, the result is the rawest, most unadulterated portrait of them that we can ever glimpse. Its why so many of my favorite records have this associations: albums like Butch Walker's Letters, or Will Hoge's Draw the Curtains, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours or City And Colour's Sometimes, Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love or Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. Each of these records, whether or not I consider them the best the artist in question has to offer (which, except for Springsteen and maybe Dylan, I do), has a raw honesty that is truly enrapturing, and each of them include some of the greatest songs I have ever heard. Were it not for Springsteen's protest-album masterpiece Wrecking Ball, which will very likely be my album of the year, I could say that none of those artists ever again reached the dizzying heights of their break-up masterpiece. There's something electric about a break-up album, something real and fleeting that is impossible to re-capture, but difficult to walk away from, and few artists are ever able to achieve that emotional apex more than once. Here's hoping that the guys from The Tower & The Fool don't succumb to that curse, but from the moment frontman Alex Correia references "Tangled Up In Blue," the definitive break-up anthem from Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, on album-highlight "Broken," it's clear that he's not kidding around.
 

The band isn't kidding around with their list of influences either, which reads like a 90s-throwback compilation and includes artists like Counting Crows, Whiskeytown, and The Gin Blossoms. There are shades of those bands' folk and alt-country leanings all over How Long, but Correia's whiskey-drenched vocal tone is a bit rougher around the edges than those groups' respective frontmen, and some finest moments here veer closer to more recent artists like Jimmy Eat World and The Dangerous Summer: emotional lyrics, set to sweeping melodic choruses and devastating verses. It’s a formula that never lets the band down, and there isn't a moment that even comes close to being weak across the record's ten tracks. Anthems of heartbreak, like "Dive Bar" and "Broken," give way to more pensive numbers, such as the title track, "My Heart is Dead in NYC," and "Breach," with Correia delivering a handful of lines in each that hits like a ton of bricks. In "Dive Bar," the album's rousing opener, it's "maybe you fell in love with a feeling and not a girl," while in "How Long," the album's elegiac centerpiece, it's lines like "And at night when I sleep, her ghost crawls in my sheets/I hear her voice calling out my name" that will transport us all back to those moments when we were forced to get over a person we had no interest in moving on without.

A swell of B3-organ keys and a scorching guitar solo are the cornerstones of penultimate cut "Die Alone," which serves as the climactic peak of a heartbreaking record. Desperation cuts through Correia's voice as he belts out the song's chorus ("And I'm praying to God that her love keeps me afloat/'Cause man, I don't wanna die alone") but we feel distinctly like there's no end to his suffering here, and the closer, though it reaches resignation, is one of the album's hardest-hitting moments. Set to the backdrop of a single acoustic guitar, softly finger-picked in a swirl of intimacy, "Who Does She Think She Is?" lands very much in the tradition of great break-up album closers. It's a slow-burn of regret and resignation, where Correia sounds tired and broken, and just like many of his predecessors in this tradition, like he has nothing left to give or to say. "Love is a horrible thing," the album concludes, and though The Tower & The Fool may be inviting a pity party of sorts with this record, that's an important part of the tradition as well.

Ultimately, How Long earns itself the rather dubious honor of being the saddest album of the year (at least so far), and while the constant surge of heartbreak and bitterness that Correia sings about may grow tiring for listeners who aren't going through a similar situation (such as myself), we've all been through a romantic disaster at least once, and these songs express those feelings perfectly. It's the kind of record you can disappear into, an album full of lyrical gems and musical triumphs that build to a sublime catharsis, and the overall impact is breathtaking. Only time will tell whether or not anyone will construct a better ode to a relationship or a more emotionally intense record this year, but for now, The Tower & The Fool is in about the best position any 2012 release could be: in my number two slot, right after Springsteen.

A Year in Review: 2011's Biggest Disappointments

2011 yielded a lot of records that will probably achieve borderline classic status for me within the next decade or so, but as always, there were a few records that just didn't do it for me. You know the type: the kind of records that you put on your "most anticipated" list at the start of a year, but ones that end up just missing the mark entirely. Whether it was because the artists in question had previously made records that hit me in such an emotional place that the follow-ups couldn't live up to them, or because I've moved passed the point where I found the artist's music relevant in my life, these five records will probably get very little attention from me after the sun sets on this year. Perhaps there's a classic here that will unveil itself once enough time has passed, but I personally think each of these records failed in such a way that I'm no longer sure what place these artists have in my soundtrack. Only time will tell.

1. City & Colour - Little Hell

It's a bit weird that this one sits at the top of this list, since I really don't think it's a bad record at all, and a bunch of people even called it his best. It's all personal here though, since Dallas Greene (the singer-songwriter behind his project) made one of the most emotional, heartbreaking records I've ever heard back in 2005 with Sometimes. That record was just Dallas with his acoustic guitar and his unbelievable voice, and when I finally discovered it 3 years after it's release, I formed such an emotional connection with it that I don't honestly know if I love the record because the music is great or because it seemed to describe perfectly how I was feeling. The follow-up, 2008's Bring Me Your Love, brought a more fleshed-out, full-band sound with it, but I still felt a connection to what Dallas was singing about. I feel nothing at all when I listen to this record though. Everything sounds as beautiful as ever, but that palpable emotion that made Sometimes something special for me is no longer present in Dallas' lyrics or vocals, and that's a bit heartbreaking for me. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I didn't find much to come back to on Little Hell, even though I tried time and time again.

2. Bright Eyes - The People's Key

The only reason this record isn't number one on this list is because the only album Conor Oberst has ever made that I loved completely was 2005's I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. That album's folky, Americana beauty had Oberst writing some of the best lyrics I've ever heard, and the last three tracks ("Land Locked Blues," "Poison Oak," "Road to Joy") are on my list for the best ways to ever end an album. The People's Key, to put it lightly, is a horrible record. It's a concept album about...aliens? Scientology? I'm not really sure, but the creepy spoken-word interludes mar songs that are already far less inspired than what Oberst is capable of. There's one moment of glory, near the end, with the piano based "Ladder Song," a gorgeous lament that finds a lot in common with Oberst's best work. It's a brilliant song, but it's four minutes of an album that seems to last far, far longer than it actually does, and the record's overall failure has kept me from coming back to the song as much as I should have. Considering that this is possibly the last record under the Bright Eyes moniker, it just seems even worse.

3. Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With You

I'm With You isn't a bad record, it's just a pretty damn boring one. It's hard to blame John Klinghoffer, who has to fill the immense shoes of former guitarist John Frusciante, and does it reasonably well when the band lets him. Unfortunately, they don't let him show off much, and instead opt to turn up the bass and let Flea take center stage, which also isn't a wholly bad thing, but which results in a record that is pretty redundant overall. Then again, maybe I've just outgrown the Peppers and Anthony Kiedis' nonsense lyrics. To put things in perspective, the last time these guys released a record, I was finishing up my freshman year of high school. I'm With You dropped on the day that I headed back to college for my junior year, over five years later. Five years is a long time in the music industry in general, but it's been a lifetime for my music tastes, which seem to have left this group behind a bit, not only judging by my lukewarm reaction to this record, but also to how little I've revisited any of their older records in the past four years. Still, I'm With You is almost unquestionably their weakest record since before Californication, even if there are a few songs I enjoy quite a bit ("Brendan's Death Song" being the highlight).

4. Lydia - Paint it Golden

This band came out of nowhere in 2008 with Illuminate, a record that I found haunting and enchanting, and one that I placed in my top five for that year, alongside the likes of Butch Walker, Jack's Mannequin, Safetysuit and Augustana. After the departure of co-lead vocalist Mindy White (she now leads the group States, who also released a record this year), Lydia supposedly ended, but that break-up was short lived, apparently. Here's another record that isn't really bad in any way, but which just feels a bit dull after the incredible record that Illuminate was. It's clear that White was the band's secret weapon, as without her, what could have been as haunting and emotionally resonant as the songs on Illuminate were, just fall flat. Leighton Antelman, the frontman behind this project, also made a record under the guise of The Cinema this year. It was a collection of catchy, electronic based pop songs that drew obvious influence from the likes of Ben Gibbard's Postal Service project, and ended up being a record I enjoyed a lot more than this one. It could just be that it's a better album (which I think it is), but it also has a lot to do with Antelman's use of the Lydia moniker, which just feels dishonest at this point.

5. I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody's Business - Gold Rush

Ace Enders, the ultra-prolific mind behind the Early November and the Million Different People solo project a few years back, has recently settled into making music under this moniker. Last year, he released an album called The World We Know, and while it wasn't one of my favorites due to what I found to be a lack of consistency, there were undoubtedly a handful of unbelievably great songs on there, and they earned it a spot on my honorable mentions list. Gold Rush seeks to be a summer pop record, but weird production techniques (especially on Enders' vocal lines) and a handful of strangely uninspired songs left this record as one that I half liked and half hated. Even the best songs don't soar like they did on The World We Know, and although I ultimately ended up giving this an honorable mention as well, it still feels to me like a strangely incomplete effort.  

*Bonus points for Lydia, for one of the weirdest album covers of the year.