06-11-2010, 08:37 AM
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Updated: June 11, 2010, 7:04 am /
Published: June 11, 2010, 12:30 am
Rock
Gord Downie & the Country of Miracles
The Grand Bounce
[Get Music/Universal]
★★★★
“Dance disappears almost at the moment of its manifestation. It is an extreme expression of the present, a perfect metaphor for life ... I find it strangely beautiful to be creating something that is made of us—made of our breath and blood and bones and minds. Something that is made of the space we occupy and made of the space between us. We embody both the dance and its disappearance.”
This is Gordon Downie, quoting choreographer Crystal Pite in the liner notes accompanying his third effort sans his Tragically Hip mates, the eloquent and elegant “The Grand Bounce.” It’s hardly a surprise that Downie can so incisively illuminate his own work by refracting the light of another artist upon it. The man has more than a touch of the poet about him. He seems to accept the interconnectedness of things unquestioningly.
Downie has been on quite the roll of late. His last two albums with the Hip—“World Container”and “We Are the Same”—have proven him to be one of the finest singers, sculptors of melody and conjurers of lyrical imagery currently masquerading beneath the moniker “rock musician.”With the Hip, Downie summons something akin to the phrase Robert Plant once employed to describe the gifts of his collaborator Jimmy Page—“A beauty somewhere to the left of heaven.”He consistently offers us something surprising, occasionally disconcerting, yet always strangely familiar.
Attempting to describe just what it is that Downie does with such seeming effortlessness— and I’ve been trying to do just that for more than a decade — is a bit like trying to embrace a beautiful statue made of smoke. Like the dance he’s chosen as overarching metaphor for this new album, it disappears almost at the very instant you’ve noticed it.
“The Grand Bounce” is Downie at his best. Like recent Hip fare, it’s grandiloquent and achingly melodic more often than it’s skittish and jarring — though Downie does both incredibly well. This isn’t Downie making Hip music without the Hip. His Country of Miracles band— Julie Doiron, Josh Finlayson, Dale Morningstar and Dave Clark—trades in the subtle manipulation of sonic space, weaving nimbly beneath, between and behind the singer’s melodic lines and unfailingly serving the imagery of the lyrics through the fine art of under-playing. That’s wonderful, because these songs sell themselves.
With the production tutelage of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla providing sonic continuity, “The Grand Bounce” proceeds as a vivid fever-dream. The stirring wall of acoustic guitars heralding “The East Wind,” and its keening insistence that “It doesn’t go around you/It goes through you” — a phrase gifted to Downie by his neighbor — makes it clear that “Bounce” is not some casual “what I did on my summer vacation” throwaway. This tune is impossibly well-crafted, but it’s no anomaly here—all 13 tracks are borne along on an air of necessity. You feel that they’ve been patiently waiting there for you to discover them all along. Fall in love with them, and you’ll note, to borrow Pite’s language, that they are “made of our breath and blood and bones and minds.” No mean feat for a rock song.
—Jeff Miers
Updated: June 11, 2010, 7:04 am /
Published: June 11, 2010, 12:30 am
Rock
Gord Downie & the Country of Miracles
The Grand Bounce
[Get Music/Universal]
★★★★
“Dance disappears almost at the moment of its manifestation. It is an extreme expression of the present, a perfect metaphor for life ... I find it strangely beautiful to be creating something that is made of us—made of our breath and blood and bones and minds. Something that is made of the space we occupy and made of the space between us. We embody both the dance and its disappearance.”
This is Gordon Downie, quoting choreographer Crystal Pite in the liner notes accompanying his third effort sans his Tragically Hip mates, the eloquent and elegant “The Grand Bounce.” It’s hardly a surprise that Downie can so incisively illuminate his own work by refracting the light of another artist upon it. The man has more than a touch of the poet about him. He seems to accept the interconnectedness of things unquestioningly.
Downie has been on quite the roll of late. His last two albums with the Hip—“World Container”and “We Are the Same”—have proven him to be one of the finest singers, sculptors of melody and conjurers of lyrical imagery currently masquerading beneath the moniker “rock musician.”With the Hip, Downie summons something akin to the phrase Robert Plant once employed to describe the gifts of his collaborator Jimmy Page—“A beauty somewhere to the left of heaven.”He consistently offers us something surprising, occasionally disconcerting, yet always strangely familiar.
Attempting to describe just what it is that Downie does with such seeming effortlessness— and I’ve been trying to do just that for more than a decade — is a bit like trying to embrace a beautiful statue made of smoke. Like the dance he’s chosen as overarching metaphor for this new album, it disappears almost at the very instant you’ve noticed it.
“The Grand Bounce” is Downie at his best. Like recent Hip fare, it’s grandiloquent and achingly melodic more often than it’s skittish and jarring — though Downie does both incredibly well. This isn’t Downie making Hip music without the Hip. His Country of Miracles band— Julie Doiron, Josh Finlayson, Dale Morningstar and Dave Clark—trades in the subtle manipulation of sonic space, weaving nimbly beneath, between and behind the singer’s melodic lines and unfailingly serving the imagery of the lyrics through the fine art of under-playing. That’s wonderful, because these songs sell themselves.
With the production tutelage of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla providing sonic continuity, “The Grand Bounce” proceeds as a vivid fever-dream. The stirring wall of acoustic guitars heralding “The East Wind,” and its keening insistence that “It doesn’t go around you/It goes through you” — a phrase gifted to Downie by his neighbor — makes it clear that “Bounce” is not some casual “what I did on my summer vacation” throwaway. This tune is impossibly well-crafted, but it’s no anomaly here—all 13 tracks are borne along on an air of necessity. You feel that they’ve been patiently waiting there for you to discover them all along. Fall in love with them, and you’ll note, to borrow Pite’s language, that they are “made of our breath and blood and bones and minds.” No mean feat for a rock song.
—Jeff Miers
