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One of my favourite things about this album is Rob's pedal steel; every time I hear vaccination scar, I'm taken aback by that fantastic playing and the guitar tone. It is such a perfect match for the song and unlike some of the pedal/lap steel work before, it was Rob and he took it on the road.
I know that Rob has mentioned his love/hate relationship with the pedal steel but it fits so well here and I'm glad that they decided to go that route rather than some more basic slide work.
Shane
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The guitars on 'Scar' are indeed excellent. So are the lyrics (as they are throughout this magnificent record). The problem with that song is simply that it was the first single. It's not a single. Lacking a killer chorus, solidly enjoyable rather than really striking or electrifying, it's a quintessential 'album track.'
A lot of people seem to dislike 'Yer Everywhere.' I don't get that at all, unless the problem is purely Gord's highly emotive vocal. That's one of the best songs on the album. It's also one of a small number of Hip songs that, as the chords rise and plunge in the chorus and Gord gives it up, makes me feel like crying for reasons I don't fully understand. 'Tired as F**k' has a similar effect in the 'balloon touch the ground' part. It's quite a trick.
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Someone said IBE is the band’s throwback album and that sounds about right. Maybe it resembles Up To Here a bit, which is prob my fave Hip album. I mentioned some of the tracks I really dig here recently. Ballsy rockers like You’re Everywhere, Heaven is a Better Place Today, Heart of the Melt, Vaccination Scar, Copenhagen, etc. The slower tracks are great too - Nee Orleans, Family and Josephine. It’s a stellar effort song for song.
I think some fans might have missed this album. If Phantom Power was the last high water mark and Music@Work a bit of a muddled letdown, I think many people didn’t catch this album. The more casual Hip fan if you will. In Violet Light was an improvement but it didn’t have any mega hits on it. So that lapsed fan maybe stayed away, possibly missing this raucous return to form at an angry time in our world (thanks, Dubya).
I like many things about World Container, We Are The Same and Man Machine Poem, but I’d easily argue this was the Hip’s last terrific album.
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I don't waste too much time with "the error of catalogue and lists," but I'll agree that, while I find much to enjoy in WATS, NFPA, and MMP (the same is not true of that godforsaken abomination WC), none of those albums throw strong song after strong song at me in the way that IBE does. I like the latter two albums; I love this one.
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“In Between Evolution” is a very apt title for this album and is reflective of the time period in which it was released. The early- to-mid 2000’s were an interlude in the progress of humanity, marked by war and terror. Just like 2017, we were stuck in a period "in between evolution". The main theme of this album that I sense is “world weariness”, built upon the pillars of loss, war, and questioning humanity. Almost every song on this album touches upon one of these three areas. If you truly listen to the lyrics, there is very little that is uplifting on here. In fact, if you let your mind go there, the album can be downright depressing. Personally I rarely get that feeling when listening to it, but it is there, just slightly submerged below the surface of these songs. If New Orleans is beat, where does that leave you and me? Sounds like getting ready to throw in the towel if you ask me.
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I love MMP and think that it, much like WC and IBE, will only get more enjoyable with listens. I'll be honest, lately I actually listen to those albums more than FC & DFN.
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Allmusic gave this album 4/5 stars, but they gave DFN a 3 and TATH a 2, so they're clearly out to lunch. There's no way TATH is the worst hip album.
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This album is the one that I've gained the most appreciation for over the last 2 years. If you had asked me in 2015 to rank all the Hip albums, I would probably have put this one in my bottom two. I bought it when it came out of course, and didn't dislike it, but it didn't hit the heavy rotation on my disc player that earlier (and even later) albums got the first months after release. Maybe because of this initial lack of connection, it was probably my least listened-to Hip album as of 2015. It's hard to love something you just don't become overly familiar with.
Not to bore everyone, but like others have posted, it was probably at least partly because my life had moved into a different phase in 2004 and I sort of was taking a hiatus from the music scene (going to concerts, buying new music). At IBE release, I had a 2-year old, another kid was on the way and I was busy with getting my career off the ground and trying to figure out the whole family thing and what being a dad is truly all about. Life comes at you fast, and this was just a busy time in my life that even stuff like diving deep into the new Hip album fell way down my priority list compared to prior albums.
As others have noted, there is a more visceral feel to this album. I kind of liked the new directions the band was going in with TATH and IVL and I felt at the time that this album was more of a re-tread of their earlier UTH style, but without a 'hit' like Blow or NOIS. I remember wondering if the end of the band was near with this album - their 'evolution' had hit a wall. I'm glad that they continued to try new things after this album, even if those albums didn't have the wide appeal the 90s albums had. I don't think the band would have survived if they didn't try to challenge themselves and experiment a bit. All that said, I have realized that I missed some of the depth in the lyrics and music on this album until recently, and I have changed my view on it considerably.
With the announcement of Gord's condition in 2016, I found myself focusing on some of the albums/songs I had the least connection to and IBE became an album that I felt like I had truly 'missed' earlier and began appreciating it in a new light. At the London 2016 concert, we got IBE and New Orleans is Beat is probably the performance that comes first to my head when I think back to that night. Such an amazing song, that I'm somewhat embarrassed that it stayed on the outer edges of my radar for so long. The fact that I now associate this album to my last time seeing the Hip live has just brings this album up to a new level for me personally.
Anyways, I'm looking forward to listening to this album non-stop over the next few days as I put together my list for the Weakest Link voting!
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One other memory of this album around the time of its release: the track list leaked early. I recall people thinking the song titles were a joke or a spoof.
The Hip do songs about geographic locations! -- "Central Park", "Nashville", "New Orleans", "Copenhagen"
The Hip do songs with long titles! -- "Heaven is a Better Place Today", "It Can't be Nashville Every Night"
The Hip do songs about New Orleans! -- "If New Orleans is Beat"
The Hip do songs about bears! -- "Gus: The Polar Bear from Central Park"
An album closer -- we'll call it "Goodnight Josephine"
I remember thinking "The Heart of the Melt" was just the dumbest name for a song ever.
Even the album title raised similar eyebrows for me -- We've got an album called "Live BETWEEN Us"; we've got an album we just did called "IN Violet Light"; anyone got a third word? How about "In Between Evolution"
All turned out to be true though.
I loved and still love this album. Bought it just before going on my honeymoon to France and Ireland. I think I gave it one or two days of spins at home before we left, and I packed it with my suitcase. We had a nice rental car in France but it didn't have a CD player, and I was suffering serious withdrawal. When we got to Ireland we had a shitmobile, but it had a working CD player and we listened to the hell out of IBE for a couple of weeks while travelling backroads in Ireland.
ct
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I absolutely love these threads, the individual track voting ones not so much... but love reading what an album means to someone else is wonderful reading.
