Find a world in the music of The Dear Hunter
Courtesy of DAN GILLAN
The Dear Hunter will be playing rock-based tracks intermingled with piano interludes on Oct. 9 at the Kniting Factory. Thursday and Fall of Troy are also scheduled to perform.
By Patricia Guzman
Oct. 5, 2009 9:00 p.m.
Bringing with them the fictional world of their latest album, “Act III: Life and Death,” The Dear Hunter will perform at the Knitting Factory this Friday.
Setting themselves apart from the band lineup, including acts Thursday and Fall of Troy, The Dear Hunter will showcase the product of the group’s musical cohesiveness with live strings, woodwinds, horns and harps.
Not often do bands create albums in the way that authors create fictional novels. The Dear Hunter, however, recently released their latest album, the third of a series of sagas about a boy wandering the landscape of war.
Lead vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, project engineer and producer Casey Crescenzo spoke about “Act III: Life and Death” as a sequel to the past two albums.
“I knew it was going to be six acts, and I knew the entire story was going to be from birth to death of this character,” Crescenzo said.
Act II focused on adolescence and love, while Crescenzo wanted to focus on a knee-jerk reaction to things going wrong in your love life: in this case, joining the military without thinking about it, he said.
The album does not take a heavy-handed political stance ““ instead it explores the psychological and humanistic characteristics of the persona the album creates. Tracks such as “The Poison Woman,” “Mustard Gas,” and “The Tank” feature characters that personify messages about war, yet these messages exist in a sort of bygone era.
“There are enough records complaining about the way that things are; I guess it’s attempting to take a more philosophical approach to war in general than it is about Iraq or George Bush,” Crescenzo said.
Released on Triple Crown Records, the album was produced and recorded entirely in the band’s studio in Providence, Rhode Island. Nick Crescenzo, the band’s drummer and brother of Casey, helped the band construct the studio from the ground up, setting the tone for what the band calls their biggest group effort thus far, Casey Crescenzo said.
The Dear Hunter guitarist Erick Serna explained that what sets “Act III” apart from all previous endeavors is the collaborative aspect. While past albums have been primarily the creation of frontman Crescenzo, this record showcases every member’s contribution to songwriting and overall production.
“I think as far as it being a cohesive collection of music, we definitely feel like we’ve accomplished that. It flows a lot better, I feel, and definitely a representation of where we’re at musically right now,” Serna said.
Like most bands, The Dear Hunter struggles to find inspiration in the latest music being produced ““ instead, they turn to film and its aesthetics.
“It’s movies like that ““ like “˜Pan’s Labyrinth’ and “˜No Country for Old Men,’ where the music and the aesthetics inspires art,” Serna said.
Though the other bands on the lineup have a heavier, more aggressive sound, The Dear Hunter band members will customize their set list to fit the bill.
“We are playing our more aggressive sounding songs, as opposed to our softer material,” said Andy Wildrick, guitarist and co-engineer of the project, and a recent addition to The Dear Hunter.
“But we also have a couple of spots in our show where we do try to break it up, and we do try to showcase our vocal harmonizing ability,” Wildrick said.
“In almost every song, we try to layer it with a lot of vocals and a lot of having everybody on the stage singing, and I think that overall is what’s going to set us apart from all the other bands on the bill.”
The band is excited to return to Los Angeles as part of their tour, especially brothers Casey and Nick Crescenzo who grew up in California.
“We’re just super excited ““ California has always been really amazing to us, even when we had never played there, people were open-minded,” Casey Crescenzo said.
For fans that come to the Knitting Factory show, The Dear Hunter will momentarily transport them away from Los Angeles and into a darker, enigmatic world.
As the opening track, “Writing on a Wall,” suggests, “Come away … where the ground is red, and you need a mask to breathe.”
