After upwards of five albums (depending on how you count), The Dear Hunter finally presents us with their first \u201cnormal\u201d record. There\u2019s no sign of their rock opera-like \u201cActs\u201d series, nor of any super-ambitious concepts like The Color Spectrum<\/i>. For the first time The Dear Hunter has put out a record with just a bunch of songs on it. On one hand, this frees them from any constraints a conceptual format might create and of the potential drawbacks those forms can sometimes bring (bad lyrics and high bombast levels in the case of the Acts, for example). But on the other hand, self-imposed restrictions can often increase creativity; without them an artist can be left without focus. And a lack of focus seems to be the case here.<\/p>\n
Casey Crescenzo is very much in the same sort of songwriting mode he was in on The Color Spectrum<\/i>, so those who liked that project may also enjoy some of what they find here. In particular, fans of that album\u2019s Violet, White, and Blue segments will find that Migrant<\/i> largely shares the style of those. But there\u2019s really a little bit of everything mixed together here so I guess it\u2019s fitting that the album cover is brown. The downside is that the styles are blurred together instead of segregated, which results in an album with a lot of different influences but not much of a distinct style of its own.<\/p>\n
Migrant<\/i>, being The Dear Hunter\u2019s most normal album to date, has also seen fit to embrace one of rock music\u2019s unfortunate clich\u00e9s: generic track ordering. The disc begins very strong (with the lead single positioned as the second track like so many records before it), has an upbeat song to kick off side two, and ends with all the weak material in a row. This does a fine job of giving someone a good first impression of the album, but doesn\u2019t do much to reward long-term listening. The song quality has also dropped off significantly. On average, it\u2019s possibly better than any of the Act albums, but those albums also featured their share of major standouts. Migrant<\/i> has many good songs, but nothing quite reaching the level of, for example, \u201cThe Canopy\u201d or \u201cSmiling Swine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opener \u201cBring You Down,\u201d and lead single \u201cWhisper\u201d in particular, are great songs with driving rhythms, expansive arrangements, and memorable melodies. Neither would be likely to quite make my top 10 best Dear Hunter tracks list were I to make one, but if this band ever were to put out a best-of compilation, those two absolutely deserve to be this album\u2019s representatives. The obvious downside to placing the two best tracks at the beginning, though, is that the rest of the album can\u2019t hope to match them and while the middle of the album is mostly solid, the record\u2019s back half verges on mediocre to downright bad. There just isn\u2019t a lot memorable going on in many of the songs on side two. The final two tracks in particular are downright boring with nothing whatsoever catching my attention. <\/p>\n
The middle of the album is generally solid with some bright spots. But nonetheless the great sections that several of the songs contain don\u2019t really add up into wonderful songs of their own. \u201cKiss Of Life\u201d has a great chorus, and \u201cGirl\u201d has neat female harmonies, and I would consider both tracks to be minor highlights on this album. But they\u2019re still just merely average songs in the grand scheme of things.<\/p>\n
If this album commits any crime, it\u2019s a major tendency for blandness. For as variable in quality as The Dear Hunter\u2019s music has often been in the past, one thing that is unquestionable is how bold it often tended to be. Migrant<\/i> on the other hand, is with only a few exceptions, as brown as its cover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":31501,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8970],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-43202","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-dear-hunter","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43202"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}