CALGARY -- You either get the music of The Tragically Hip or you don't.

And by "get" I mean you love with a fervour bordering on the religious, or more appropriately the nationalistic, and by "don't" I mean it leaves you as cold as the northern landscape the Kingston quintet sing so passionately about.

If you fall into the former category, as most of the 13,000 people at the Dome last night certainly did, then a 2*-hour Tragically Hip show is like a pickup truck ride to heaven where Hockey Night in Canada is on 24 hours a day and Molson Canadian runs hot and cold from all of the faucets.

If you fall into the latter group, as this weary scribe who has seen them three times in the past eight days and 10 times in the past 10 years admittedly does, then it's like being stranded in a Sudbury hotel room with no TV, no key to the mini-bar and a head-cold to boot.

And no matter how many times you see them, ne'er the twain shall meet.

The reason is that a Hip concert is about the music, pure and simple. The band (filled out on this tour by the under-used duo of keyboardist Chris Brown and backup vocalist Kate Fenner), the stage setting (an equally underused crop circle in the middle of a prairie wheat field) and even the light show are all geared towards spotlighting the songs.

The band members themselves -- Paul Langlois and Rob Baker on guitars, Gord Sinclair on bass and Johnny Fay on drums -- as competent musicians as they are, don't seem to want to entertain past playing their instruments. In their spotlights they stood, playing to themselves and not even to each other.

Frontman Gord Downie, though a little more amped-up than usual last night, still orbited above the audience (probably somewhere in the galaxy of Hemponia), muttering unintelligibly.

And even with Downie acknowledging the crowd briefly before the second song, it still came across like your senile grandmother remembering your name before trying to change the channel on the toaster.

So back to the music we turn.

And last night, compared to their Vancouver shows, the music was sorely lacking in intensity. That could be because the Hip kicked off the first of their two sets with the most obtuse track, Tiger the Lion, from the latest of their eight studio CDs, Music @ Work.

The song, when performed right, can be a heavy, hypnotic number, but last night it merely plodded and came off like a bit of a false start.

And even when the Hip threw in their more well-known material like Gift Shop and My Music at Work, the energy of the band and even the audience was noticeably tempered, with the most notable exception (before press time) being a rousing rendition of Blow at High Dough.

The songs, extended as they were with added instrumental parts, sounded flat and listless.

And when that's all you have in your bag of tricks to entertain a packed arena, well, that's not nearly enough to run up the flagpole and ask everyone to salute.