The Dear Hunter, Migrant

The Dear Hunter

Migrant

Reviewed by Joseph Tingle

The Dear Hunter’s fifth major work, Migrant, is either the most or least ambitious album the band have ever created. While most contemporary acts establish their sound and fan bases before “risking it all” on ill-timed and half-baked concept records (“going prog”), frontman Casey Crescenzo and his band have done the opposite. After building a reputation as being a concept-record mastermind and releasing four highly-realized conceptual works under The Dear Hunter name, Crescenze has taken the path of the original 70’s proggers: he’s gone back to basics.

Well, kind of. Comparisons aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find another recent album that sounds like Migrant. Although the record is mostly filled with shorter songs that do not share any particular thematic or conceptual space, the songs and arrangements themselves are still rich and unique. The end result is a fine and diverse record of standalone tracks that mostly work, but sometimes display growing pains from Crescenzo’s transformation from concept album maestro to songwriter.

Though prog-rock decorum is abandoned for an indigenous, indie-rock approach, the album still maintains some of the trimmings of the more bloated of the two genres. While the meandering themes and top-heavy compositions that have marred previous The Dear Hunter works are fully exchanged for concise song craft on Migrant, the record still suffers from some of the usual concept-rock melodrama. Lyrics are personal and commendably honest, but border self-garnishing and lack subtlety. On one song, “Whisper”, Crescenzo bellows the lines “we’ve all made our greatest mistakes on the greatest intentions” with vindicating ascent and theatrics, as if delivering a moment of catharsis to a Broadway audience.

Ultimately, the verdict is still out on whether Crescenzo is better as a songwriter or musical director. Not that one is necessarily better than the other, but this reviewer is personally unsure as to whether Crescenzo possesses the poetic lyricism to be more of a Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan than a prime Andrew Lloyd Weber.  But, at any rate, The Dear Hunter have the drive and endurance to create excellent, stylistically liberated music, and any serious listener would be doing themselves a great injustice by ignoring Crescenzo and his band.