City & Colour @ Knitting Factory 3/19

On Wednesday I was at work planning on an exciting night at home watching a movie. Then I stumbled upon a listing for the Knitting Factory - City & Colour was playing a sold out show! Which is kinda crazy because I had no idea that C&C had a big enough following in NYC to sell out KF. Of course being that it was sold out and I just heard about it I was kinda screwed but I managed to get on a guest list last minute and scrapped my plans in front of the tube.

If you're not familiar with City & Colour it's basically the singer (Dallas) from Alexisonfire. He's been writing and recording solo shit for years and has a crazy following in Canada. But he hasn't really done shit in the states. In fact he said the KF show was his first in the US - which isn't true because he played SXSW but I think he meant the first show of a headlining US tour.

If you're a fan of AOF then you might not dig C&C - it's super mellow and folksy, not heavy at all...ever. Then again if your favorite part of AOF music is the pitch perfect voice of Dallas then this is your shit because it's all him.

I just recently got into C&C so I'm not super familiar with the songs so I can't tell what the set list was... not that I ever do anyway. But I'll tell you a bit about the show. When Dallas first came on stage he was joined by some of the dudes from the opening band. They did some "plugged in" songs together, which was odd because Dallas is usually doing the singer/songwriter bandless thing. The songs sounded pretty good beefed up a bit but everyone was waiting for him to put down the electric and pick up the acoustic. One quick note, he said that he never practices with those guys and that they were just winging it, which is impressive.

Anyway, they did about 3-4 songs and then got off stage. From that point on it was all Dallas (except for the last measure of the last song). Like I said I don't know all of the names of the songs but I recognized a bunch and was singing along to most. Dallas is a fucking fantastic musician in every way. Of all the dudes in all the bands in the screamo/emo/metalcore/whatever world that I could see blowing up it's Dallas. He's just that much better then everyone else and he has perhaps the best voice in music right now... yeah I said it, the voice of an angel even.

Towards the end of the set he said that if you knew who he was you might recognize the next song. At this point he went into an acoustic version of "Boiled Frogs" by Alexisonfire, which was super awesome. However there are a shit load of AOF songs I would have preferred but whatever, it was really good. After that it was over, except for the mandatory encore.

The show was amazing, his voice was perfect, his potential is unlimited. I really was impressed and you absolutely must see him live if you get the chance.

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