Gord Downie’s Secret Path delivers on its heavy ambition – The Globe and Mail
Oct. 18, 2016
Deep into his elegiac and conceptual album Secret Path (out Tuesday), Gord Downie talk-sings hard against an insistent bass-and-drum beat and and a steel-blue synthesized mood. “I know a way that I can help you,” says a raven to a boy who is cold, hungry and hopelessly lost in the wilderness. “What you can’t escape, you gotta embrace.”
The track increases in intensity, eventually bursting open into an orchestral rock surge. It’s called Haunt Them, Haunt Them, Haunt Them, which advocates a plan for escaping a “plain, ordinary death” by way of legacy that involves an unsettling story about an injustice which very few people wanted to hear of for a very long time.
To describe Secret Path as merely the Tragically Hip front man’s fifth solo album would be a tremendous feat of underselling. Its ambition is heavy; its cause, significant.
