The Dear Hunter: Why You Should Listen

Good tunes time.

Sometimes I can’t stop listening to a record. It’s always an accident. Every year or so I forget about The Dear Hunter, and then I remember The Dear Hunter’s ACT IV: Reprise in Reprieve when I spot it on my record shelf or it pops up on an old playlist. But when I remember this record I am compelled to listen to it all the way through. Not just once, but 50,000 times.

Part of it is Casey Crenscenzo. CC is the Martha Reeves of prog rock, by which I mean this man’s tone does the ASMR thing. I get that subtle orgasmic tingle in the back of my neck. While this is prog rock, The Deer Hunter put their arrangements together like really smart pop songs. The way that songs like Hand in Hand by Elvis Costello sound the way those ‘Satisfying’ videos feel. Like the machine gun crank of a pneumatic drill in your hands, like popping off of a jump with perfect timing, like an expertly constructed sentence, like the homey taste of garlic and bacon mashed potatoes. Beautiful is the wrong word for the voice here. His voice can have a strained coarsness when he wishes, but it also contains an airy open-chested theatrical brass, that I generally don’t like. But I can contrast this with the way Darius DeHaas generally makes cool songs like Lost in the Wilderness sound too clean, too crispy, so that it doesn’t really sound like music anymore. The song sounds like talking, but not in a cool Guy Fletcher way. The band is erased by the vocal performance. But what works for TDH is that the band does not exist to serve the vocalist, like most Broadway recordings, in TDH, there is no distinction between band and vocalist. They are all the band, so this theatrical vocal style works.

Another part of my admiration of the band is the lyrical content. TDH’s discography is (mostly) a single story about a single person moving through gritty situations. While I don’t particularly care for the story, TDH often shapes their lyrics in a manner that allows the listener to extract meaning beyond the broader context of the record. Of course there are songs like ‘The Tank’, which are about . . . a tank in battle in WWI, but that also makes me think of Rush’s Red Barchetta or I’m In Love with My Car by Queen, or the fact that the first rock n’ roll song was a song about an Oldsmobile, so I can forgive the weirdness of this song out of context. But then there are songs like Waves. Waves is about the main character regretting an ill-fated relationship with a prostitute. But it simply doesn’t need to be. At its core, it’s a song about heartbreak and the suffocating sensation of having your soul torn from another person. There are songs like Wait, which is about the main character dealing with regret. But it can also be the counter to the melancholic zen of Kansas’s Dust in the Wind. Wait is not about the existential terror of nothingness beyond life, but the existential terror of having to live with an eternity of consequences, and the existential terror of recognizing one’s own place in the dynamic tapestry of the Real. And there are the in-between songs too. My favorite song on ACT IV is Night on the Town. Specifically, this is about the main character being kidnapped after stealing is step-brother’s identity. But it can also just be about being kidnapped, and I don’t know how many songs have been written on this topic, but this might be the only one not written by a psychopath. It’s as much fun as it is serious, and the lyrics are sometimes telling a contradicting story to the orchestration, because you have to remember that TDH is making prog music, yes, but what they are actually doing is writing pop songs if pop songs were better.

2005 was a fascinating year for music. Fiona Apple, Kanye West, Gorrillaz, SoaD, Queens of the Stone Age. Culture had been hammering grunge’s coffin nails since the release of Kid A shortly before 9/11. Something strange was happening. We had been mired in grunge for so long, and good music was everywhere for the most part. Grunge was becoming the sleepy and quiet reemergence of Desert Rock that it is now. But there was a strange baroque-pop movement emerging out of emo and pop-punk. None were more successful than Panic! At the Disco, of course. Then a year later, 2006, TDH released their first record in the same vein and same spirit. Pop music was coming from a musical theater audience, rather than from grizzled rockstars. There was a focus on craft and new sounds, the likes of which hadn’t been explored as seriously in pop spheres since the Pet Sounds Era. We can blame the internet for this. In fact, it is likely due to the internet that TDH exists at all as a creative project. Bands like P!ATD and TDH ask a question: what if we elevated pop music? And the answer was a sort of flamboyant extravagance that paved the way for Grimsical bands like 21 Pilots and Imagine Dragons (withhold judgement). In my opinion, this movement did not elevate pop, but commercialized quirk. The bands that clung to the idea like TDH, Icarus the Owl and Art by Numbers were shipped away to the prog genre. They were not even granted a seat at the Indy table, since indy had abandoned the great 90s Indy movement that included bands like Jellyfish and artists like Jason Faulkner and moved towards a folkier sound reminiscent of the Builders and the Butchers and Mumford and Sons (who we have to thank, in part for Colter Wall and Amigo the Devil). As of now, pop music is deservingly owned by the rap genre. When you have maestros like Kendrick Lamar leading the charge, it’s hard to imagine rock n’ roll and indy making their way back into the pop scene any time soon. I like this shift because it has created a bizarre counter culture of groups like Clipping, Death Grips and Sleep Token; it has served the reemergence of greats like Curtis Mayfield and De La Sol. But I don’t like what it has done to bands like TDH, who are still tucked away on the cultural backburner. So I am writing this mostly to promote a group that I think deserves a little more love.

My wife and I saw TDH live in Phoenix a couple years ago and had a transcendent experience that further solidified my adoration of this band. Many bands don’t sound better live, of the few that do, TDH is one of the best. Their progressions are tighter, their tones are crisper. They were the closest experience to seeing King’s X live, which is the tightest live band I have ever seen. TDH have serious chops.

Ultimately, the final question I’d like to ask is about how one should listen to The Dear Hunter, in particular ACT IV. This one is tough for me because many bands are walking bands, some are woodworking bands, carworking bands, snowboarding bands, driving bands, etc. But what I adore about TDH is that they demand attention, no matter how many times you’ve heard them. They are a driving band, in that case, but more than that, they are a sitting and listening band. If you can afford the luxury of time, sit down with ACT IV and just listen. It recalls an era when music was more than wallpaper, when records were like the movies, where a group of friends could get together with some beverages and pass around a lyric sheet and discuss the album between flipping the record. It’s music that demands fixed attention.

So, listen to it. If you’re alone, grab your noise cancelling headphones and close your eyes, enjoy the experience. If you’re with friends who like tunes, get a twelve back and turn up your sound system. If you’re on a drive, sacrifice the playlist and listen to this album. It’s good music. I like to listen to this album with my wife. It was one of the first records I introduced to her, and it’s special to us both, so we often sit down for the ride and just let the music take us where it wants to go. This is good music, good pop music from an early aborted subgenre that deserves a little resurgence, if you ask me. Fundamentally, The Dear Hunter is elevated pop music.