Words: Lindsay Bradley
It was a miserable Saturday evening in Leeds, the wind and
the rain made it a difficult walk up to the O2 Leeds Academy. As I walked
inside at 8:30, City and Colour were just coming onto the stage. The early set time
was due to some club night on after. Fair enough.
The band opened their set with the wistful ambience track ‘Of
Space and Time’ taken off their new album The
Hurry and the Harm. This album, in my opinion, is Dallas Green’s best work
yet. The opening track reaffirmed this belief and from that moment onward, the
audience had forgotten their worries and the weather outside.
When ‘Body in a Box’ from Bring Me Your Love began, the crowd cheered. When you read the
lyrics it is not the cheeriest of songs (We celebrate the lives of the dead / It's like a man's best party, only happens when he dies.), but the Leeds crowd sang along at the
top of their lungs. Everyone was so joyful and excited to be at the show. The
atmosphere in the venue united the crowd, nothing could bring them down - it
was just a shame a pint of Tuborg cost a painful £4.50.
Old favourites such as ‘Sleeping Sickness’ flawlessly fitted
in with the likes of stripped down ‘The Grand Optimist’. The mixture of full
band and solo acoustic fitted well, as he played the relatively upbeat ‘Fragile
Bird’ with its reverberating guitar, taken from 2011’s Little Hell.
There was some banter during fan favourite ‘Comin’ Home’. As
Dallas sang, ‘I’ve seen a palace in
London / I’ve seen a castle in Wales’, the crowd jokingly booed and in
typical Yorkshire style, and chants of ‘Yorkshire, Yorkshire’ erupted. Dallas
stopped mid-song and joked ‘This ain’t a fuckin’ soccer game, chill out!’
Everyone laughed and he continued the song with a new zest of enthusiasm,
feeding off the crowd’s energy.
Indeed, City and Colour are not an upbeat cheery outfit but
they have a similar effect of Chris Carrabba’s Dashboard Confessional. Dallas
Green’s ability to bring a crowd together to make them feel not so alone is no
easy feat. He achieves this with ease and the audience becomes his to play,
their energy drives him through the set.
However, the show could not last forever. They closed the
set with the haunting ‘Death’s Song’, the echoing ‘woah’s’ are still firmly stuck in my
head two days later. People were not ready to go home but the eighteen song set was soon over. As we all headed outside, we were hit with the cold bitter wind of reality.
Oxford Road Rating: ★★★★★
