It starts innocently enough, and slow, with the download (I think from emusic) of a six tune extended play called “All Is As All Should Be” by a band called The Dear Hunter. This happens maybe two years ago. Undeniably a great performance by extremely gifted musicians and a singer who is both super melodic and lyrically smart, here was a pop rock band playing challenging, memorable music, densely arranged, and expertly recorded. Perhaps because I download it at a time when I am consuming more music than I can carefully listen to, and also perhaps because I don’t have the physical artifact to carry around in the car or plop into the home stereo, this record, as good as it is, does not make it into heavy rotation, so it’s buried and somewhat forgotten.
Fast forward to Fall, 2019. Somehow, The Dear Hunter appears back on my radar. I’m not sure why. Maybe my attention is drawn by the appearance of a new and totally unrelated release by a band called simply Deerhunter. Maybe I listen again to that e.p. by The Dear Hunter and become curious. At any rate, I start to dig around. There’s nothing in my local record store. On the web, maybe in the iTunes Store or in the Amazon stacks, available for download but rare in cd and non-existent on vinyl, I discover an astonishing and prolific catalog of music from these guys going back thirteen or fourteen years. I discover, of particular interest to me, a penchant towards insanely ambitious projects: one, a concept album spread over an entire decade of recording, spanning a stunning five album sequence, all but one of them double l.p. sets, referred to collectively as “The Acts;” the second, a series of nine extended play records, four tunes on each, thirty-six songs altogether, titled “The Color Spectrum,” each record of which comes on a different colored vinyl disc, representing, you guessed it, all the colors in the spectrum. I find myself wandering over to eBay, where I have never made any purchases. I find “The Color Spectrum,” sealed, brand new, all nine 10 inch records in a box set for $300. 36 songs for $300? That’s outrageous, I think, and, to add insult to injury, terribly disrespectful of the musicians, who would not see a penny from the sale. But unable to resist, I place a bid on the thing anyway and I’m immediately and justifiably rejected by the seller. Eventually, I find the entire collection of “The Color Spectrum” on iTunes for the obscenely low price of $7.99. $7.99 for 36 songs. That I can do, but I still feel guilty, as the musicians, just as from the eBay sale, would not see a penny. Well, maybe a penny. I get over it and download the collection. I figure that if the band did not want the sales from iTunes, they would not have made their music available there.
I start “spinning” the entire 36 songs from start to finish. A first time. A second time. A third. Finally, I lose count but come to know these songs relatively well, and to love them, and to love them even more with repeated listenings–because of their wild abandon, their disregard for genre boundaries, their infectious melodies, their head banging tendencies, their humor (albeit infrequent), their musical virtuosity. Conceptually, I can really only guess about the significance of the color spectrum as an organizing principle. My only theory: the tunes, thematically or tonally, might approximate the color from the spectrum on which they sit, therefore, the heaviest of the tunes, and lyrically the darkest tunes, can be found on the black record. That’s the best I can do. And it does seem to be a theory borne out by the collection’s progression, as the tunes seem to get lighter (mostly in musical ways) as one moves through them. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Are the songs good? Yes, they are very good. I decide that I have discovered a new favorite band.
Eventually, as Fall progresses and changes to Winter, I discover that this band is not really a band, per se, but a guy, one Casey Crescenzo, who is the mastermind behind the project, and, I guess you could say, The Dear Hunter. He records and performs with a band of players, one of whom, the drummer, is his brother. I find a few youtube videos of them performing live, in particular songs from “The Color Spectrum,” and my fandom becomes a bit more rabid–as they are on stage as virtuosic and precise and energetic as they are on record. And finally, I find my way to The Dear Hunter website. Here, I find an exciting surprise: “The Acts,” all five albums, 9 full length l.p.’s on colored heavyweight vinyl, a bonus orchestral album, and a download of still another project, are available in a deluxe box set, apparently, only through their website. I stew over the purchase of this box for some time, decide maybe a month after its discovery to pull the trigger, when, lo and behold, I find it sold out through the website store. It can be purchased, it seems, nowhere else. It finally appears on eBay for up to $800. The band (or Casey) seems to have cultivated an air of scarcity about the music. None of the previous albums, save for digital download versions, appear to be available anywhere. eBay retailers are scalping these records to make a hefty profit, aware that it is unlikely that Crescenzo will release another printing.
To stave off my desire to hear this sequence of records, I discover on Spotify and begin to listen to regularly still another double album-length record from 2013 called “Migrant” from The Dear Hunter. The tunes here are every bit as exciting as anything on “The Color Spectrum,” and I am officially hooked. In desperation, I begin to listen to “The Acts” on Spotify. It is undeniably great and ambitious, and a hard physical copy of the project becomes, for reasons not entirely explicable to me, a kind of holy grail, a highly coveted item. A second-pressing prayer is answered. It becomes available again through the website and I snag on one just in time before it is once again sold out within days. The loot is photographed at the top of this essay. Not only is the music incredible, but the packaging and the presentation and the variety of vinyl color is exquisite, the whole thing a master-class in a hybrid of rock and roll and comic book art. No, I did not pay $800 dollars for it; instead, I paid a more than fair and somewhat lower average price than what you might pay at your local record store for a box set with 11 l.p.’s inside.
Now I find myself totally immersed in “The Acts,” listening repeatedly, and doing something that I do rarely anymore, something I would do obsessively when I was a teen: reading the lyrics along with the playback. I’m trying to figure out what these recordings mean, which is not something one usually does when listening to the rock music, especially these days. Even when my favorite childhood prog bands worked with the conceptual (Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or Hemispheres by Rush), it was relatively easy to grasp the gist of the story these artists were trying to tell. This project is perhaps the musical equivalent in rock of reading a rather dense novel. It’s sprawling; its canvas is wide. So it will take me some time. Maybe there’s a blog entry in there somewhere and sometime in the future. Or maybe I will just continue to stew in the mystery of it all.
The music on these records, all of them, “The Color Spectrum,” “Migrant,” “All Is As All Should Be,” and “The Acts,” is bombastic, epic, melodic, cerebral, complex, stylistically wide-reaching, theatrical, cinematic, emotionally evocative, beautiful, serious (but not entirely humorless), and immersive. It’s hard while listening not to feel totally surrounded, totally enveloped. The lyrics demand attention, otherwise, full appreciation is next to impossible. The Dear Hunter seems relatively obscure in the world of pop and progressive rock, but it also seems clear that they have (or he, Casey Crescenzo has) reached a level of success and achievement independently that would be the envy of any ambitious independent artist. He runs a summer music camp for enthusiasts of The Dear Hunter. I’m not kidding. While I might not be in attendance at his camp, nevertheless, I am all in. But the true test: check back with me in sixth month’s time, or a year. My gut tells me that I’m in for the long haul. I’ve experienced nothing like The Dear Hunter in a long, long, long time, if ever. I’m along for the ride for the foreseeable future. I invite you to join me. At this moment I’ve got nobody to talk to.
michael jarmer 