Love This Song, Die Laughing

How to describe Rhode Island Rococo Rock & Rollers, The Dear Hunter?

Renaissance Faire Coheed and Cambria. Emo Music for High School Band Kids. Songs for children conceived to Rush’s 2112. Tunes for Horny Disney Adults. Homebrew Dungeons & Dragons Steampunk Soundtrack. Songs for lapsed Catholics. Post-apocalyptic yacht rock. The house band on a late-night talk show hosted by Lazslo Cravensworth. Shit your older brother from your dad’s first marriage listens to. The kind of band where the purpose of at least two guys onstage is not immediately discernable, but they are bopping the hell out with some mallets and a MacBook.

I love The Dear Hunter because I am a failed musical theater kid who quit the Catholic church when I was seven because I thought “God wants to see you all in his kingdom of heaven” meant God had it out for me and wanted me Dead. I am prone to wild misunderstandings, enthralled by bombast, and utterly terrified of and tempted by the void. The Dear Hunter check all these boxes.

The band’s primary output for the first decade of their career were a series of interconnected rock operas in five Acts. They tell the story of one huge dumbass guy who falls in love with a sex worker who reminds him of his mom and then he fucks up his whole life by taking the identity of his dying half-brother who he meets in the trenches of World War 1. The grand themes of deception, love, betrayal, seem from a distance, simply silly. The self-seriousness of a band who has a whole Reddit page, annual summer camp, and podcast dedicated to dissecting their own work can turn off even the dedicated listener.

The fear of any lore-heavy fandom is that it’ll become a gatekeeping circlejerk. I’m sure those guys exist in The Dear Hunter crowd, but what has stuck with me from all their live shows is the warmth and humor of the band and fans alike. At one show, after the closing notes of “Red Hands” someone shouted, “Play Red Hands!” Casey feigned indignance, and said, “We just did??” and the guy replied, “Do it again!” And I could tell Casey really thought about doing it again, but dissembled they only had so much time on stage, and he wanted to play us all some new stuff.

I’m not here to try and sell anyone on the deep wells of emotion behind The Dear Hunter’s opus—to be swayed to their rhythm demands an almost religious devotion. Somewhere around Acts 4 and 5, they amped up the camp. To string any story across 5 hours of sonic landscape is an impressive balancing act, and required in its final movements a showing of their self-aware hand to stay upright.

Enter “The Bitter Suite IV and V: The Congregation and the Sermon in the Silt”. Just look at the title. A full ten years after Fall Out Boy’s From Under The Cork Tree codified the contemporary Too Long Title. This track is a brassy, ball-to-the-walls cartoon villain song, pumping all the pomp of a papal procession into the portrait of the primary antagonist: a priest moonlighting as a pimp. It wears all the hallmarks of a Dear Hunter hit: musical motifs reprised from earlier records, an infectious bassline, percussive accents for every measure, and a big chant-along crescendo. The band’s singer and lead composer’s name is literally Casey CRESCENZO which may not mean crescendo, but come on, camp is in the man’s blood. It’s the playful sense of humor here that saves everything from becoming overwrought.

Over-the-top artistry doesn’t always hold water in the emo rock world. Crescenzo played the voice of literal God in the star-studded collaboration album from Forgive Durden, Razia’s Shadow: A Musical; an album fun to listen to exactly once, with every subsequent spin begging the question, “What were they trying to do here?” It seemed to me that despite all the zany antics, the performers on this record forgot that they were supposed to be having fun.

When I first got into the band, I went on a date with someone who told me their favorite music was disco, and I said, oh you mean like this? And I played them “King of Swords (Reversed)” because the band ended their live set with that song while lighting up the venue’s lone dusty disco ball and because I have no tact, chill, or real knowledge of disco. The date laughed a lot and nicely explained to me I had no idea what I was talking about.

To love something, every now and again, you need to laugh at it.

After a repeat disco ball and “King of Swords” finale on their latest tour, the band departed the stage while the speakers blasted “Funniculi, Funnicula”.

If you want to listen to The Dear Hunter but don’t have the patience for ten years of prog-rock, I concentrated some of their music into this much shorter playlist.