IISGBY blends blues and country tunes and sweet piano melodies with Green’s smooth vocals, which weave through the record and gently lull listeners with their warm tenor. With no standout single, the album functions as a holistic experience, each track creating a mood that bleeds into the next; a soft, hazy gradient of blues.
Like a gradual decrescendo, it starts off with its most striking tracks, “Woman” and “Northern Blues.” The former, with its lilting, gritty riffs and touches of psychedelic rock, plunges us into a smoke-filled world of heartbreak and angst. The latter follows with a mellower sound and steady beat. Listening to it, we’ve hopped a freight train and left that dark place, but our hearts are still heavy nonetheless. IISGBY seems to brighten up midway, though, providing country-pop tracks like “Runaway” and “Lover Come Back” that are light and mellow. The album starts off moody and pensive, promising more daring sounds ahead, but the songs that follow just can’t live up to that anticipation.
IISGBY seems innovative and fresh at the start, but by the end it hasn’t veered away from the familiar sounds we’ve come to expect from City and Colour. As Green muses on the track “Mizzy C,” “If I try to change direction, I might not find what I’m looking.” That reluctance to switch things up comes through in the music. The middle tracks become a wash, as no song has any distinguishing feature that sets it apart from the rest. While IISGBY is a great record to listen to if you want to huddle up in a corner of your favorite study nook and lose yourself in pensive, folk-infused pop, it never seems to go beyond the light, soft-rock playlist you might hear playing at your local Starbucks.