The Full Spectrum: The Dear Hunter's Migrant

As announced the other day, The Dear Hunter announced their new album "Act V: Hymns with the Devil in Confessional" to be released on September, the fifth and likely final album in a string of concept album with an over-arching story linking all of them. To celebrate this, I'm going to team up with our music guru, Kue, to review all the previous Acts leading up to Act V's released. However, they do have some non-Act albums that shouldn't be ignored. So if you would like to listen along, here's Migrant. 

I’m thankful for this album because even though it doesn’t get a whole attention, Migrant is an important album in the history of The Dear Hunter. Pointing out the obvious, it’s the only Dear Hunter without a gimmick and it very much felt like a pause between The Color Spectrum and the band resuming the Act series. It’s definitely not Dear Hunter’s best work but it’s hugely indicative of where they were at musically in the sense that a lot of these songs would’ve fit into the Color Spectrum (I’ve even speculated on whether or not these songs were Color Spectrum ‘leftovers’) as well as their continuation to broaden their horizons as far as instrumentation which flows into lead singer Casey Crescenzo’s debut symphony Amour & Attrition that was released soon after Migrant. The Dear Hunter isn’t a “regular band” but this album is sort of the answer to the question of “what would they sound like without any sort of gimmick” and it’s an answer fans will probably need to get use to because it sounds like Act V will be the final act in their overarching story or at least be the last in a while (I mean, they took six years between III and IV).

The pro and con of this album is that since it holds no concept, there’s no character to see the lyrics through the lense of so what we get is songs that are far more personal, or at least feel that way and that seems to mean the album is a bit ‘softer’ than your usual Dear Hunter album. The end result in all of that is an album that sees more valleys than peaks in terms of loud vs quiet. I’m not saying Migrant is completely monotone but there does seem less of a “rock” sound compared to what we’re used to which can be viewed as a negative or a nice change of pace depending on who you talk to. My personal feelings on that? It honestly depends on my mood but at the end of the day, you’ll likely find me listening to pretty much any other Dear Hunter album. In the end, Migrant still has a narrative that’s being put across but it’s because of any concept, the narrative comes more from the band’s history rather than a fictional story. It may sound like I’m harsh or dismissive of this album, a Dear Hunter album that may slightly miss the mark is still better than most other albums by most other artists in my opinion. Once you’re all done, I highly suggest listening to Crescenzo’s Amour & Attrition, it’s got a certain vibe about it that transitions into Act IV quite well.