There is a specific kind of rock record that only a band in their second decade can make — where the fury has been replaced by something more complicated, something that knows what fury costs.
In Between Evolution is that record for The Tragically Hip. Recorded in the winter of 2003 at the Bathouse Recording Studio in Bath, Ontario — the band’s own converted facility, a place they’d built partly so they never had to explain themselves to anyone — it arrived in the summer of 2004 carrying the weight of a band that had been the biggest thing in Canada for fifteen years and had mostly stopped caring whether America noticed.
The Room They Built
The Bathouse mattered. It sits outside Kingston, on the Cataraqui River, and the Hip converted it from an actual bathhouse in the late nineties. By 2003 it had become a kind of pressure valve — a place where the band could work slowly, argue freely, and not watch the clock.
Producer Dave Ogilvie did not come in. Nor did any of the outside hands the label might have suggested. The band produced this themselves, with engineer Gavin Brown, who had worked with Barenaked Ladies and Billy Talent and knew when to stay out of the way.
Gavin Brown is not a man who over-polishes. You can hear that here.
Five People Who Know Each Other Too Well
Rob Baker and Paul Langlois have been playing guitar together since high school in Kingston. By 2004 the question wasn’t whether they could play — it was whether they could still surprise each other.
On “Vaccination Scar,” they do. The riff sits in that mid-tempo pocket the Hip owned — not quite hard rock, not quite bar rock, something denser than both — and it keeps finding small turns, small wrong notes that turn out to be right.
Gord Sinclair’s bass is the underrated structural fact of every Hip record. He doesn’t show off. He just makes the floor solid. Johnny Fay on drums is the same — completely uninterested in flash, completely committed to forward motion.
And then there is Gordon Downie. In 2004 he was forty years old and writing lyrics the way a man writes when he’s given up trying to explain them. “Toronto No. 1” is about something. It might be about hockey. It might be about the specific loneliness of being beloved by a country that is not the country you’re standing in. It’s probably both and also neither.
I am not going to pretend the back half of this album hits as hard as the front. “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken” floats a little loose. A couple of tracks feel like they were better arguments at the Bathouse than they are songs on a record.
But the first six tracks are a band playing with the confidence of people who have nothing left to prove to anyone except themselves. That is a very specific kind of freedom and it sounds like this.
What Comes Through the Speakers
“Goodnight Attawapiskat” is the one I always come back to. Named for a First Nations community in northern Ontario — Downie was paying attention to things most Canadian rock singers weren’t, years before it became a cause — it builds slowly, patiently, without any of the arena-rock urgency the Hip could deploy on command.
The band let it breathe. Brown let them let it breathe. That restraint is the whole record in miniature.
In Between Evolution was the last Hip record to reach number one in Canada before Downie’s diagnosis in 2012 changed everything. At the time it felt like a band consolidating. In retrospect it feels like a band quietly saying something they wanted on the record before everything changed.
Put it on after ten o’clock. Let the first few tracks run.