Our Lady Peace at 9:30
There is a certain giddiness that comes along with seeing one of your favorite bands -- you either wait in line, brave sky-high service charges, or scour Craigslist for tickets; you count down the days until the show; you impatiently sit at your office desk the day of hoping that they play song x and song y; you bear the incessant pushing, shoving, and general human crush that accompanies many shows to get as close to the stage as possible. And then lights go down. It's time -- the waiting has paid off.
But as you emerge from the club, ears ringing, you can't help but feel let down. The show just wasn't as good as you would have hoped. It didn't reach that musical zenith you had so played out in your head. Is it you? Have you simply outgrown their music? Or is it them? Have their shows become less inspired, less compelling, less able to capture your attention?
One always hopes for the former, but at the end of Our Lady Peace's set at the 9:30 club last night, we could hardly deny the latter.
Our Lady Peace -- a Canadian quintet whose music bounces from garage rock to quasi-anthematic pop songs -- took to a relatively bare stage in front of a capacity crowd, putting to an end a three-year absence from area venues. But from the band's opening song -- "Car Crash," from 1997's Clumsy -- one couldn't help but feel that the show would be a bust.
Always a mid-tempo rock band, Our Lady Peace could not seemingly crawl out of a self-imposed mid-tempo flatline, lending little energy or inspiration to songs that are otherwise well written and often loaded with hooks. Singer Raine Maida cut an unmoving and unmoved figure during the first four or five songs, while lead guitarist Steve Mazur's head banging and spastic movements seems just a little too scripted. Even though the band played crowd favorites "Starseed" and "Innocent" (from 1995's Naveed and 2002's Gravity, respectively) second and third, the energy both on and off stage only took on some life towards the end of the set, when they tore into four consecutive cuts from their newest release -- 2005's Healthy in Paranoid Times -- including "Angels/Losing/Sleep," "Where are you?", "Picture," and "Will the Future Blame us?" Regardless, it was a little too late.
Our Lady Peace occupies a musical genre that can easily go from interesting to boring, from experimental to all-too-familiar. The band's original guitarist, Mike Turner, left in 2001, citing creative differences. Unfortunately, with him went most of what had made the band stand out in its earlier releases. His guitar playing was erratic and messy, opting for sounds and textures that pushed the bounds of traditional rock guitar. Maida's singing was uncontrolled, dramatically jumping from bass low to falsetto high in the span of a phrase, while bassist Duncan Coutts' and drummer Jeremy Taggert's rhythmic feel pushed and pulled the music in new and interesting directions. Our Lady Peace could proudly claim they had a sound of their own, a sound that attracted fans and spawned dynamic live performances.
That all changed with Turner's departure and the band's decision to employ producer Bob Rock -- best known for his work on Metallica's most recent releases -- for the recording of Gravity. Rock applied his time-tested formula to a band that had in the past has shunned such approaches, crafting a guitar-heavy sound and forcing each song to fit into radio-friendly time formats. The result was an album that sounded less like Our Lady Peace and more like a half-baked Metallica demo. Much the same could be said for Healthy in Paranoid Times (which they claim took 1165 days to record), and the band's live performances have taken a similar hit.
Thursday night's performance wasn't bad, it just wasn't up to snuff. The music lacked inspiration, and combined with the recent tendency towards mainstream familiarity in their sound, resulted in a performance that could best be described with a shrug of the shoulders. And given the giddiness that some longstanding OLP fans felt in the weeks leading up to the show, that's just too bad.