POP MUSIC CRITIC JEFF MIERS SAYS THAT WITH ITS NEW CD, TORONTO BAND THE TRAGICALLY HIP HAS REINVENTED ITSELF
The Tragically Hip's new CD is its strongest offering yet
![<i></i><br /> The Tragically Hip We Are the Same [Zoe/Rounder] .... out of four](http://media.buffalonews.com/smedia/2009/04/05/07/152-bn-20090405-F003-d-325845-MI0002.standalone.prod_affiliate.50.jpg)
Dear, sweet music. You loved her once, a long time ago. You whispered sweet nothings in her ear, courted her with chivalry, promised Paris but delivered a suburb in Podunk, grew lazy and inattentive, cultivated a beer belly, left her at home while you went off chasing the newest, glitzy young thing with your equally loyalty-challenged buddies.
You will not have the right to claim hurtful surprise when she finally ups and leaves you. You had it coming.
If it’s the truth that we have marked this moment in the “everyone can do it, anywhere, at any time” phase of music’s creation and dissemination with a failure to place any real cultural value on the music itself, then it would logically follow that the artists will fall into line and dutifully churn out music that doesn’t matter.
Most have done exactly this, and who can blame them? Times are tough, and hedging one’s bets isn’t exactly a radical approach these days.
The Tragically Hip, however, have opted for the oftnamechecked, but rarely chosen “path less traveled.” The Canadian band’s 12th studio album, “We Are the Same,” is its most ambitious, detail-oriented and cleanly rendered effort to date. In an era when plowing the same furrow ad infinitum has been elevated to a virtue, the Hip has instead built with its own hands a gorgeous, fragile crystal city and placed it at the top of a wind-swept hill. There it sits, shimmering, naked to the elements, but unafraid.
The band has reinvented itself. We had no right to expect as much.
The signs were there, and are clear now, in the forgiving glow of hindsight. When the Hip teamed with producer Bob Rock a few years back, in service of the watershed “World Container” album, it seemed that the breath of new life was filling the band’s lungs. “Container” contained all that the revered northern quintet had been cultivating for its twin decades together –the sinewy guitar interplay, the nonsense-free rhythmic/melodic oomph of the rhythm section, the “surrealism for the common man” approach to lyric writing that has made singer Gordon Downie an idiosyncratic genius. Producer Rock added muscle, helped the group fortify its melodic fortress and brought out the best in the band.
If “World Container” at the very least reached the high watermark left by the group’s previous best – say “Road Apples,” “Fully Completely” and “Trouble At the Hen House,” or pick your own favorites, if you must –it also suggested that there was much good work left to be done. An optimist might have felt the twinge of new beginings, even if the more rational mind insisted that the Hip had nothing to prove, and could simply rewrite “New Orleans Is Sinking” once or twice per album for the rest of its days without offending anyone.
“We Are the Same” blows all of this conjecture out of the water. It’s more than a brave record from a band that could easily coast from today ‘til retirement –it’s a necessary record, one that goes above and beyond.
Once again teaming with Rock, Downie, guitarists Paul Langlois and Rob Baker, bassist Gord Sinclair and drummer Johnny Fay tapped a rich, free-flowing vein, then stood back and let it bleed. When the last drop had hit the floor, the Hip had an unequivocal masterpiece on its hands, a record that is its most musically pleasing, adventurous and heart-rending. Pastoral and forward-looking in equal measure, “We Are the Same” boasts country-folk paeans, glittering post-modern shards of glass, deftly rendered epics, a dash or two of Zeppelin-esque rock, even a song suite that presents a three-movement meditation on a theme. It begins as night turns to day, with “Morning Moon” answering a child’s question –something like “Daddy, how come I can still see the moon when the sun is up?”— to the lilting sway of “Harvest”-era Neil Young. The album concludes with another dawn, this time one heralding a “Country Day,” as a blank slate with endless possibility just sitting there like an unused piece of chalk.
In between, the musicians employ subtlety as the sixth band member, whether it’s with the tapestry of acoustic/electric guitar interplay rooting “Honey, Please,” the elegiac slide runs snaking their way through the threnodic ache of “The Last Recluse,” the “Beck’s got nothin’ on us” post-hip hop drummer’s strut pushing the “Coffee Girl” down the street on her way to work or the full band getting its hands dirty, building a monument to the beauty of the “Queen of the Furrows,” out of nothing but straw and hay.
All of this is achieved without you really noticing it, until about the third time through the record, when you realize that it now owns your soul, like it or not. (And I suspect a good many Hip fans won’t; this is music to dream to, not drink beer to, no offense to anyone intended. There are really beautiful string arrangements going on, sparse orchestration in service of a storyteller’s volition. How will it play in arenas? Powerfully, I expect, but only if the listener accepts change and growth as both good and necessary.)
Atop all of this, Downie delivers his finest lyrics and strongest vocal melodies yet. The seeds of these were planted back in “Ahead By A Century,” sprouted over the years into “Bobcaygeon,” “It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken,” “World Container’s” title song, and now, come fully into bloom with “Now the Struggle Has A Name,” quite possibly the strongest, most viscerally imaginative and imagistic song in the Hip canon.
The theme of all of these songs is empathy, compassion, engagement, or as Downie says on the band’s Web site, “(M)e and you; him and her; the little things that we say to each other each day, and even the things we withhold. Our thoughts dwell on the people in our lives a lot more than we admit; we’re always trying to relate, to make a connection.”
With a band at the peak of its collective power roiling beneath him, Downie’s lyrics are simultaneously felt and heard. There is now no separation between form and content.
“We Are the Same” is like a love letter, one that begins Dear, sweet music…
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