There are records that sound like where you grew up even when you didn’t grow up anywhere near them.
Chasing Shadows is that kind of record. The third full-length from Vancouver’s Spirit of the West lands somewhere between Celtic pub rock and literary folk, the kind of album that rewards you if you stay still long enough to let it work.
The Room It Was Made In
The band recorded Chasing Shadows at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver in 1991, the same studio that had been handling everything from Bryan Adams to Loverboy for years. Producer Gerry Mohr and engineer John Webster brought a clarity to the sessions that the band’s earlier work — looser, scrappier — hadn’t quite captured. Webster had a gift for making acoustic instruments feel physical without losing their air. The mandolin on this record sits in the mix the way a good photograph sits on a wall.
John Mann and Geoffrey Kelly anchored things as they always did — Mann on vocals and guitar, Kelly on flute, whistles, and guitar. But what elevates Chasing Shadows past folk-rock pleasantry is the rhythm section. Linda McRae, who had joined the band a few years earlier, was deepening her role as a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, and her harmonies on this record have a weight that keeps Mann’s melodic instincts honest. She doesn’t ornament. She balances.
What the Songs Are Actually Doing
The opening track “And If Venice Is Sinking” is one of the finest opening moves in Canadian folk rock. It sets the terms immediately: vivid imagery, a melody that seems inevitable from the first bar, and a lyric that’s about something without explaining itself. Mann wrote songs the way a good short story works — you’re three verses in before you realize you’ve been holding your breath.
The record moves through political edges and personal losses without ever becoming a lecture. “Home for a Rest” — already a live staple and the song that would eventually reach every Irish pub in the English-speaking world — gets its studio recording here. It’s rougher than it would later become in memory, which is exactly right. The album version has some gristle on it.
The quieter moments are where Chasing Shadows earns its keep. “Shipping Up to Boston” exists here before the Dropkick Murphys ever touched it — well, not quite, but the Celtic-with-a-North-American-accent thing Spirit of the West do natively is on full display throughout. These weren’t musicians trying to sound Irish. They were people who had absorbed that tradition and carried it west.
Kelly’s flute playing throughout is worth your attention on its own. He has a way of phrasing that makes you aware of the silence around each note, not just the note itself.
The Thing Nobody Says About This Band
Spirit of the West were better than their reputation ever fully reflected. They existed in that commercially awkward space between too folk for radio and too rock for the folk circuit, too Canadian to break internationally the way their talent warranted. Chasing Shadows went gold in Canada, which is honest. It should have gone further.
This is an album made by people in their thirties who had been playing together for years and had finally learned how to be exactly themselves on tape. That’s rarer than it sounds.
Put it on after dark. Pour something amber. Let “And If Venice Is Sinking” start the night right.