City And Colour at The Forum
City And Colour – The Forum – 14 June 2010
Words by Jamie Reynolds / Photo’s by Marcus Maschwitz
Dallas Green in the flesh is a rather quiet and even a little shy but this is not the case when he’s out on the stage. Out on the stage breaks he barriers with his intimacy and the way he opens up his feelings and emotions to the crowd. On stage his voice is loud and powerful even when breaking away from the steady amplification of a mic. Dallas Green gives a whole new meaning to the cliché of ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’ whether it’s with Alexisonfire or City And Colour. His alluring and heartfelt vocals stand out as something sincere and genuine and tonight is no different.
As Dallas makes his way out to the mic situated in the middle of The Forums’ stage the entire audience lets out a monumental applause, I can’t stop thinking that this is the type of applause that is reserved for legends and that maybe it is a sign of what this man truly is. A brief time is spent doing a quick final tune of his guitar while he utters “thank you very much for coming tonight” and then the show begins with Coming Home. I have heard audiences singing along to majority of words sung at them but tonight is on a completely different level, maybe it’s due to the sombre nature of the songs but the echoed words make it sound like a carols by candlelight evening. It might sound lame giving it that kind of description but it really was something else, it sounded like the crowd had been practicing their parts prior to the show for months and the effect it has on the songs is just spine tingling awesomeness. Like I said it seemed like the crowd had been waiting for City And Colour and had rehearsed every song to impress them. Every line is sung by someone, if not everyone, and you can’t help but feel that this is something genuinely special. As Coming Home carries on the crowd goes ecstatic for the “I’ve seen a palace in London, I’ve seen a castle in Wales” line, the euphoria keeps building and when the rest of City And Colour join in the atmosphere inside these four walls is like nothing I have witnessed before. The most amazing thing however is that this reception is not only reserved for the first song but every song after that too,
Tone is the one thing over and above everything else that stands out tonight for me, the warmth of Dallas’ guitars matches the strong piercing melody’s of his vocal range perfectly. There is no special chorus or reverb or any other effects that are blatant, instead the tone of the guitars is more genuine and organic. It’s hard to explain but the way City And Colour play simple chord progressions with soulful tone’s just grips me and when Dallas lays his beautiful vocals to the songs it is just something out of this world. He has so much range and so much control of that range, you can see that his voice is a instrument and the man is a maestro with it. As the night progresses they run through a long list of classics like Day Old Hate, Bring Me Your Love and Body In A Box which is a definite favourite for me. The only downfall is the handful of idiots shouting out requests throughout the set to which Dallas finds a little rude and justly so. At one point someone requests a song to which he replies “That was the fourth song on the set, your requesting songs that I have already played”. Another reply that really gets me laughing is when he tells the audience a story somewhere along the lines of this:
Once at a show people where shouting out requests, like tonight, and my cousin replied and said when you go to a cinema and you shout different movies, do they appear on the screen?
To which the entire crowd applause’s.
This is the other part to Dallas’ set, he includes a healthy helping of dry humour that is so refreshing. They end the night with an encore of Save The Scissors and and the explosive finale of Sleeping Sickness which gets a standing ovation from every single person.
