Two journalists are standing in a day-glo hallway of the Deadhead Disneyland that is Manhattan's Wetlands, where the Tragically Hip have sold out five consecutive nights for the kick-off of a national tour supporting their seventh studio album, Phantom Power.

The writers are awaiting Hip lead singer/lyricist Gordon Downie for a post-soundcheck interview. He arrives shortly and greets them both politely. The problem is, he's only been scheduled with one of them.

"You've got the *other* Gordon ... Gord Sinclair," he apologizes to the second journalist, pointing her to the Hip's bassist in an adjoining lounge. "You'll like him. Smart guy, very loquacious ..."

It's just an innocent mix-up of Gordies, which of course could only happen with a Canadian bandùor more specifically, the *biggest* band in Canada.

The Barenaked Ladiesùwho incidentally titled their first albumGordon after the ubiquitous nature of the name in their homelandùmay have scored a No. 3 U.S. chart debut with their album Stunt, but it was Phantom Power that The Toronto Star heralded as "the most eagerly anticipated Canadian album of the year."

The same could hardly be said of the album's reception south of the border (where it debuted at No. 151), but you wouldn't know it from the crowd that packed the Wetlands each of the five nights to shout along to every one of Downie's wordsùeven on "Nautical Disaster," a four-year-old song that boasts neither verse nor chorus and precious little melody. But it's a Downie gem nonetheless, a feverish nightmare vision as vivid and disturbing as any scene from Titanic: "Four thousand men died in the water here and five hundred more were thrashing madly as parasites might in your blood...."

"It is weird," says Downie, bewildered at the crowd's tendency to sing along to such an unwieldy lyric. "And it's difficult, because you try to sing in key, and all of a sudden this wall of out-of-key noise comes right back at you."

Compared to "Nautical Disaster" and much of the other mood-intensive material from the Hip's last two album's ('94"s Day For Night and '96's Trouble In the Henhouse), the songs on Phantom reveal a return to the anthemic sensibility of '92's Fully Completely, the album which broke the Hip in Canada the way Ten broke Pearl Jam in the States.

From propulsive rockers like the lead single "Poets" to the mournful "Escape Is at Hand For the Travellin' Man," an elegy for band friend Jim Ellison of Material Issue, who committed suicide in 1996, Phantom Power is packed with shout-along melodies which the Wetlands crowd already knew by heart.

Relentless as they are by Tragically Hip standards, however, the songs on Phantom Power are a far cry from the U.S. radio-ready alternapop of the Barenaked Ladies' current hit single, "One Week." The quintet's songs are grounded in a twin guitar, bass and drum groove that is equal parts Stones-inspired blues, Bandian roots and Deadsy jamming, tied together by Downie's richly poetic and frequently oblique lyrics and live, free-form tangents on apparent non-sequiturs.

They tend to be either songs in progress or simply stream-of-conscious musings on whatever's on his mind that particular day. "He did a long bit on scaffolding last night," laughs Sinclair after the second night's show, alluding to the construction debacle that had Times Square closed off to traffic the week of the band's Wetlands residency. It is not difficult to imagine Phantom Power's title springing from such fertile ground.

"Phantom power," explains Downie, "is a natural thing. On your [recording] console, you use it to pump forty-eight volts of extra power to certain types of microphones when you switch on the console. I think it was given its name because it doesn't really come out of the wall, it doesn't appear to come from anywhere. And I guess you can expand on that in the idea of power, period. It can be given and it can be taken away, or you can't have power unless you give it away. All these things start going through your head. It's just a very provocative word. And then, 'phantom,' the idea of another world ...."

He shrugs. Despite his engaging stage presence, nobody would mistake Downie for the loquacious Gordon in the band off-stage. When pressed for his take on the Hip's apparent inability to smuggle its Canadian success into America (an attempt spanning three labels MCA, Atlantic and now Sire), he seems visibly (and understandably) exhausted by the subject.

"I don't know what's made of us breaking out or anything," he sighs. "I have a feeling the only way we could do it ... the only thing we're really selling is a love of craft. We really like songwritingùthat's kind of our flooring. I think we're the only band that actually took the term 'developmental band' seriously.

"I don't know. I don't usually perform autopsies on this stuff. Because it's not dead."