By Jillian Locke

I don’t know about any of you other there, but when I heard Act III: Life and Death, from The Dear Hunter, which, for those of you who don’t know, is the fantasy rock-opera brainchild of Casey Crescenzo, former vocalist/guitarist for The Receiving End of Sirens, a part of me woke up. I was zapped right back to the age of five, sitting alone in my play room, my only company being my Fisher Price record player, my first vinyl, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and my parents’ Pat Benatar and Queen records. TDH awakens dormant portals of creativity, long encased in cobwebs due to lack of use, disillusionment, and the general jaded shackles that come with growing up and forgetting the tiny spark of awe and delight that showed you, in the first place, that there is something more. TDH are refreshing, invigorating, and actually inspired me to use a whole slew of new words to describe music. So, without further ado, I give you Casey Crescenzo and Act III.

“Not to discredit the writing in TREOS, I was six years younger…it’s a very different situation. I was just so young, and I wanted so badly to excite and inspire the band I was in. So there was a lot of trying to prove myself, and then it almost backfired,” Crescenzo explains. “The real milestones in your life happen at a natural progression, not a forced progression. My heart and my mind are very in synch, and they don’t necessarily have a real filter in front of them. Luckily, I’m in a band with people who trust me producing this music, and a label that trusts us.”

Following up the Ms. Leading demos Crescenzo worked on as a side-project while in TREOS, The Dear Hunter formed in 2006 to create Act I: The Lake South, The River, North, and Act II: The Meaning of, And All Things Regarding Ms. Leading, and on June 23rd, released the third full-length installment of the six album epic, Act III: Life and Death. The collection documents the life and sudden death of a boy known only as “the Dear Hunter,” at the turn of the 20th century.

“Act III is just continuing in that surreal nature of Act II…I hate calling it a parallel universe because it conjures up sci-fi imagery, but that’s what to call it, because I didn’t want it to have any root in reality. A friend of mine in The River Empires came up with a better way to describe it – we kind of write about the space in between the space,” Crescenzo illustrates. “I wanted to keep it as unique to itself as it could be. Not so much fantasy-world, but a much different type of time line. In the movie Inglorious Bastards ~ the movie starts as historically accurate, but by the end, it’s just obviously so far from what the real history is, it’s irrelevant. There’s no real issue that it’s not historically accurate because the story itself is so interesting. For Act III, it’s the same idea. I didn’t want to do a lot of research for WWII, because the album was just supposed to capture the time period ~ it was really romantic in my head. I score the movie in my head, and I try to explain it visually to the rest of the band, and they try to translate it through sound.”

Musically, TDH stand on their own, creating elaborate, fantastical arrangements, forging a mind and soul-expanding concoction of sounds that take the listener back to the turn of the 20th century, where the story of this collection takes place, right through the 21st century, summoning the bastard child that would emerge from the unlikely loins of Protest the Hero, Coheed and Cambria, Danny Elfman, and The Beatles. Act III: Life and Death marks a true return to the pure essence of artistry and musicianship.

Along with brother Nick Crescenzo on drums, guitarist Andy Wildrick, bassist Nate Patterson, and guitarist Erick Serna, Crescenzo, who not only sings but also lends his hand to the piano, guitar, and a plethora of other instruments, TDH recently finished up a tour with Coheed and Cambria, are currently touring with Thursday, will join forces with the Annuals in late October, and will pick up a tour with Thrice in mid November to finish off the year. TDH touches down at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston on November 1st. Lose yourself in Act III, then see it live.

www.myspace.com/thedearhunter, www.thedearhunter.com, www.triplecrownrecords.com

(Photo by Dan Gillan)