by Ryan Harron

Created on: September 25, 2007

Hospital Music was a very interesting album to listen to, because it is possibly the most personal of Good's albums, while at the same time being one of his most obviously political ones. It's also a fairly quiet album in musical terms (understandable, since it was recorded almost entirely acoustically), but one that still manages to pack the lyrical loudness that made Good such a popular figure in Canadian music during the late 1990s.

One of the first things noticeable in this album is how stark it can be in places. For the most part, Good strips the music bare of the samples, effects, and other technological tricks that he's displayed skill in using in his previous albums. The result is the creation of a very confessional sort of atmosphere, one that is only backed up by Good's lyrics. He shows himself here, warts and all, letting everyone see the insecurities and shortcomings that he feels he has, but in a way that does not present himself as an object of pity: he's fundamentally broken, but that's okay, because there's a suggestion that the rest of us are all ass well.

As the title suggests, Hospital Music is also an album very much concerned with health. This is true on the personal level, with several songs being devoted to issues of mental illness (an issue that Good has discussed in the past, as well). It's also true for the more political sides of the album - Good seems to be arguing that war is nothing more than the outbursts of a mentally ill society. Albert Einstein once defined mental illness as "doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results each time", and it seems as though that is the way that most societies seem to approach warfare. At a time when most criticism of war seems to be questions along the lines of "is this war being fought in the right way?" or "was this war started for the right reasons?", it's refreshing to hear something that comes from a completely different angle and speaks out against the idea of war in general (although it does so in a subtle way).

One thing that this album is not, however, is overly commercial. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been following Good's career over the past while; since the release of his first solo album, Avalanche, Good's been moving farther and farther away from the mainstream sound that made him such a success in the late 1990s. There's only one song, Born Losers, that jumps out as 'single material' - the rest of the songs are ones with a subtle depth that requires a few committed listenings to. Casually listening to them once or twice probably won't do anyone any good, and in the modern Itunes/Purevolume a-la-carte music marketplace, that's as bold a move as any for a musician to make.

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