The Trinity Session

The band wanted to record live to one stereo microphone again, as on their debut, and chose the Church of the Holy Trinity for its natural reverb. The sleeve says the recording was made on two-track R-DAT, but Peter Moore said it was a Sony Betamax deck connected to a Sony PCM-F1 converter, with a single Calrec ambisonic microphone. The sleeve notes state that it was not mixed, overdubbed or edited. To get past the church officials, the band said they were the Timmins Family Singers recording a Christmas special for radio.

The session began on the morning of 27 November 1987. The group recorded the songs with the fewest instruments first and added instruments gradually, building up to the more complex arrangements. Margo sang through a PA system left behind by a previous group, to balance her against the electric guitars and drums. After six hours of small changes to volume and placement the sound was settled, just as the last guest musicians arrived. The band had barely rehearsed with most of them. They paid a security guard $25 for two extra hours, and the last song of the day, Misguided Angel, was done in a single take. The popular story that the whole album was made in one day is not quite true. Margo's a cappella chant on Mining for Gold was recorded a few days later, during the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's lunch break.

The mix of originals and covers includes Hank Williams's I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Patsy Cline's Walking After Midnight, the road song 200 More Miles, a slowed version of Lou Reed's Sweet Jane, and Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis). The last, with Working on a Building, was left off the Latent pressing and added for RCA.

Reception

It reached 28 on the Canadian RPM albums chart and 26 on the Billboard 200. It went gold in Canada in March 1989 and platinum that September, and gold in the United States in July 1989, reaching platinum there in 1996. Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone gave it four stars and wrote that it is in the tradition of albums that establish a mood and sustain it so consistently that the record seems like one continuously unfolding song. The Los Angeles Times named it one of the ten best albums of 1988.

Writing in 2008, Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner said the album's main appeal remained its lo-fi sound and that it was as if the church were an instrument. In 2001 Mark Richardson of Pitchfork called it prescient for tapping the amber atmosphere of classic country and foreshadowing a move toward glacial tempos. The album placed 62nd in Bob Mersereau's 2007 book The Top 100 Canadian Albums and won the 1980s category of the first Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize in 2015.