Guitar Rock (Atmospheric): Tragically Hip's Day for Night

I bought it second-hand over the Internet from a Canadian guy. I bought it based on a rather different song from a newer album, but this one was from a few years before. Yet, I found that the Tragically Hip on Day for Night opened up worlds in their stories, stories made of lyrics and music. I put the album in a category only created to describe such music—Guitar Rock (Atmospheric). The charging guitars certainly led the way in the music, but with many layers, it all creates an atmosphere. This is the kind of music you can rock out to, scream to while driving down the highway, but it isn’t sing-a-long, crowd-pleasing, radio rock. It isn’t anthems of the young and old. It is charging guitars that bring you into a world, an atmosphere, creating the setting for some very strange, disturbing, oddly compelling stories.

The guitar is mournful, determined, and tragic all at the same time in “Nautical Disaster.” The composition surrounds the story in song with the atmosphere to fully present the awful predicament of being in a lifeboat that can only can carry 10 people, meanwhile there are 500 sailors in the water around you. “Anything that systematic would get you hated,” and you can feel that hatred in the constantly driving rhythm, driving you to make the decision. “Those left in the water got kicked off our pantleg,” but there’s no time to mourn. The song keeps moving on, even as you’d have to keep moving in a situation like that, rowing away, escaping those who would swamp the lifeboat trying to save their own lives. The song keeps moving, developing the awful scene that takes place “off the coast of France, dear.”

Yet, as the lifeboat pulls away (“we headed for home”), there’s an instrumental break that is almost hopeful. The determined riff of the song takes center stage, with the high tones of the lead guitar giving that sense of hope even as you turn your face away from the drowning sailors still in the water.

It’s short-lived hopeful, determined instrumental break. The story’s a dream, and the bookends to the dream describe a conflicted relationship. Whatever is going on in that relationship, it is connected with this dream, this nightmare, this terrible equation of choosing 9 others to save leaving the rest “thrashing madly as parasites might in your blood.” Connecting any relationship to such an image doesn’t speak very highly of that relationship. Comparing a conversation to the sound of “those fingernails scratching on my hull” reminds you of those time when your only hope was to rip yourself away from the conversation, run away and break all ties, escape the threatening words, head for home and never look back.

With the sound of fingernails, the lyrics end leaving us with an instrumental coda to the song. The coda, however, isn’t as hopeful as the instrumental break (after they head for home). The guitar solo, as melodic as it is, almost helps you to know the grating, fearful, terror-stricken sound of dying men and this awful conversation. The lead guitar dips lower in the scale than the first break, and losing that bit of high end brings the mourning right through. The song doesn’t lose any steam until it drifts off at the end; both instrumental breaks have the same charging tempo, guitar riff, and drive from the drums, but by losing that little bit of high end, the fingernails leave you not with that hope of a disaster overcome but a disaster that stays with you forever, even as the lyrics say, “a sound in my memory.”