The Kids Don’t Get It by The Tragically Hip
From World Container (Universal Canada/2006)
A new Hip album is a big event (as these things go) in our house, so I was starting to sweat when the usual 24-month period between releases came and went. I was a also little nervous about the album itself, as Bob Rock, who has previously worked with rock gods Metallica, Bon Jovi and pathetic rock god wannabes the Cult was producing it. As a slavish Hip fan – the kind who pays an extra $10 he can barely afford to get the Canadian version because it’ll be 5 more months before his favorite band’s CD will be released in the U.S – the thought of the Hip putting out a great white north version of Wanted: Dead or Alive (“I’m a Mountie….”) set my teeth on edge. To my happy surprise, World Container is great. It is up-front and angry, and the boy's playing is as aggressive as their best live performance, which believe me is saying something. Gordon Downie's voice has never been as good, covering more emotional territory than ever (and here I thought that the best one could hope for was that their voice would go all Leonard Cohen on them as they aged). It is easily their best release since Phantom Power. And while I hate it when critics resort to that sort of lazy-ass statement, as in"its the best Stones recording since Some Girls." when anyone who knows anything knows that isn't remotely close to the truth, this time it is true. I swear. Thanks in part to Bob Rock, World Container is a great rock record. As those who know me have heard me say before, we need more of those.
From World Container (Universal Canada/2006)
A new Hip album is a big event (as these things go) in our house, so I was starting to sweat when the usual 24-month period between releases came and went. I was a also little nervous about the album itself, as Bob Rock, who has previously worked with rock gods Metallica, Bon Jovi and pathetic rock god wannabes the Cult was producing it. As a slavish Hip fan – the kind who pays an extra $10 he can barely afford to get the Canadian version because it’ll be 5 more months before his favorite band’s CD will be released in the U.S – the thought of the Hip putting out a great white north version of Wanted: Dead or Alive (“I’m a Mountie….”) set my teeth on edge. To my happy surprise, World Container is great. It is up-front and angry, and the boy's playing is as aggressive as their best live performance, which believe me is saying something. Gordon Downie's voice has never been as good, covering more emotional territory than ever (and here I thought that the best one could hope for was that their voice would go all Leonard Cohen on them as they aged). It is easily their best release since Phantom Power. And while I hate it when critics resort to that sort of lazy-ass statement, as in"its the best Stones recording since Some Girls." when anyone who knows anything knows that isn't remotely close to the truth, this time it is true. I swear. Thanks in part to Bob Rock, World Container is a great rock record. As those who know me have heard me say before, we need more of those.
So what it is about Canadians that they embrace – what seems to me to be, anyway – Gordon Downie’s lyrical "weirdness" (I mean that in the best possible way, too) to make them one of the biggest bands going (in Canada, anyway)? I just don’t think Bon Jovi would have been as huge stateside if they sang about hockey, great Canadian surrealist landscape painter Tom Thompson and the way WWII fighter pilots wore their hats, and R.E.M. didn't really start shifting units until Stipe spit the gum out of his mouth and sang about the one he loved. I know Downie's words mean something, I'm just not always sure what. And I'm not sure I care, either. They sound good, and not in the same way that Joey Ramone's lyrics do (that is, Joey's lyrics are so brilliantly moronic, like the loveable mutt that he was). Listening to The Hip (and their contemporaries The Weakerthans, Kathleen Edwards, Sarah Harmer, et-al has contibuted to my fine-if-incomplete education on Canadian sensibilites but I'm not there yet (though Generation X author Douglas Coupland has a fine book, Souvenir of Canada, that is quite informative). C'mon Canada, Help me out!
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