CD Odyssey Disc 1415: The Tragically Hip

From country on our last review we swing back to good old classic Canadian rock and roll.

Disc 1415 is…. Day for Night

Artist: The Tragically Hip

Year of Release: 1994

What’s up with the Cover? It appears to be a dreamscape of some kind, with a full mon glowing over some crazy trees. This feels like a scene out of an Oscar-nominated animated short.

How I Came To Know It: I know a lot of Tragically Hip albums, but this one comes from my friend Chris, who was parting with a bunch of his CDs and passed this one along to me. I have two friends named Chris who both love the Hip, and combined they are responsible for me having almost half of the Hip albums in my collection.

How It Stacks Up: I have seven Tragically Hip albums. Of those seven, “Day for Night” comes in at #3, so a respectable bronze medal.

Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4

“Day for Night” is a record that takes some time to get to know, but it will be worth your while. There are a lot of layers of sound here, creating a wall of sound. That approach to music isn’t usually my jam, but the Hip make it work.

The biggest reason for this is the songs have great bones. These songs could be just guitar/vocal acoustic numbers and would still be good, and that solid underpinning shines through on almost every track. Some of the bluesy structures reminded me of their earlier records, with a natural groove that plays well off of all that thick reverb guitar and crunch.

It also helps that the production keeps everything very even in the mix. I feel this is a common aspect to many a band that stays together as long as the Hip did (ultimately they only split due to Gord Downie’s tragic illness and death in 2017). I expect letting everyone shine like they do on “Day For Night” is a big part of that longevity. It’s more fun to be in a band where your part matters just as much as the guy beside you.

As a listener, this evenness lets your ear wander from element to element easily. Sure the guitar is great, and the vocals are compelling and poetic, but more often than not I found myself sinking down to the great bass work of Gord Sinclair. Sinclair really pins their sound down, letting the melody fly over him without ever being overwhelmed by it with lots of extra nuance beyond the song’s basic rhythms

And of course Gord Downie is a natural frontman, with a hypnotic quaver in his voice and a gift with words that is positively poetic. When the music is stripped down, Downie’s vocals are like a mournful wind through a canyon, and when the wall of sound goes up, he blows like a hurricane. It is fun both ways.

People sometimes complain that they don’t know what Downie is singing about, but on “Day for Night” I found it was easy if I paid attention. I didn’t always want to pay attention (see: “letting your ear wander” above) but when I did, it was worth it.

A lot of the songs have an undercurrent of anxiety in them, but it is a very energetic anxiety; the kind that makes you want to absorb your problems into yourself rather than ignore them. He can turn a phrase with the best of them, like this opening of “Thugs”:

“Everyone’s got their breaking point
With me, it’s spiders. With you it’s me”

But more often than not the songs’ lyrics stand best when taken in their totality. The sad but defiant eulogy of “Inevitability of Death” or the stripped raw existential dread of “Scared” are both standouts but quoting a line or two seems to drain their power a bit.

Of all the Tragically Hip records in my collection, this one is the heaviest and that denseness took some work for me to dig through. At times it felt like it was sidling up against metal. It was definitely shaking hands vigorously with stoner rock. This is a record you don’t fall into so much as dig your way through. It was a bit tiring at times, and on a few songs, I gave up before I reached the chewy centre.

Also at issue is that common mid-nineties malaise of being too long. At 14 songs and almost a full 60 minutes, “Day for Night” needed a few well-placed bits of editing. You could probably lop the last two songs off the end and have it done. They aren’t bad songs, but by then my brain was full, and they weren’t interesting enough for me to want to shoulder aside all that good stuff I’d heard prior. Also, with song titles like “Titanic Terrarium” and “Impossibilium” you would be right to suspect a bit of self-indulgence.

That’s a minor quibble though (and the killer bass work on “Impossibilium” reminded me favourably of Blue Oyster Cult’s Joe Bouchard at his best). Overall, this record was a nice late addition to my collection, and I’m glad I gave it a chance, albeit a good 25 years after its release.

Best tracks: Greasy Jungle, Yawning or Snarling, Nautical Disaster, Thugs, Inevitability of Death, Scared