Best Songs from the Dear Hunter's Act I: The Lake South, the River North

I absolutely adore every song to do with this character, the sleazy big band/ jazz sound used in most of them is excellent. I find this song to be incredibly catchy as well as by far the best of Casey's vocals on the album, sounding incredibly powerful without hitting a point where he's fully screaming. The orchestrations are all around excellent and create an extremely different sounding song on the album, employing a sound that is further explored on subsequent albums.

The first proper song on the album, having an extreme amount of similarity in guitar tone and chord progression to Omar Rodriguez Lopez, giving this song a feel that is incredibly similar to the Mars Volta. Casey"s vocals here are extremely good, as he screams with such emotion and simply sounds amazing. I like the more mellow sections of the song as well, as these help provide excellent contrast, making the intense chorus even more impactful.

I love the piano arrangements at the start, with some lovely soft vocals, and how it slowly builds up, adding more layers of vocals until it explodes into a powerful chorus. The song has quite a few similarities with Radiohead's A Wolf At The Door to me, in the general melancholy tone, and the way the song is sung.

Quite a beautiful song that is much softer compared to most of the other songs, with powerful vocals that never hit the point of screaming, instead maintaining the almost calm nature of the song. While nothing in particular stands out in terms of the sheer bombast of other songs, I do really like the chorus.

I find this one to be quite dull honestly, while the way the vocals continue to build up is really cool, I find the song to be somewhat too long, and so the 4 minute build up becomes lost on me due to just wishing it was cut slightly.

I love the saxopohones and violins here, they create a tone that makes me think of some sort of mystical forest, and all around sounds quite whimsical.

An awesome acapella piece with a great amount of vocal layering and harmonisation. It starts off the album nicely and introduces a common phrase that makes an appearance throughout the album series "The flame is gone, the fire remains"

I find the song to drag quite a lot, as after the first minute, it essentially has the rest of the time sounds like the instruments are being tuned.