Our Lady Peace - Burn Burn

All You Did To Save My Life - 3
Dreamland - 3
Monkey Brains - 3
The End Is Where We Begin - 3
Escape Artist - 3
Refuge - 3
Never Get Over You - 3
White Flags - 3
Signs Of Life - 3
Paper Moon - 3
Total - 30 stars / 10 tracks = 3.00 stars

What the hell? Our Lady Peace is generally who I would call my "favourite" band. When people ask the question, they are my go-to answer. Even if their albums aren't what I would call "the best," I generally trust that I can throw in one of their albums and enjoy what I'm going to hear. I'm even one of the few people who agreed with Jeremy Taggart's claim in 2002, that Gravity was their "best album by far." Unlike most people, I didn't hate the increasingly mainstream direction they were adopting. Then this happened.

Despite being their first record since breaking from Columbia, due to their feeling forced to create radio-friendly singles, Burn Burn is a decathalon of uniform, easy-on-the-ears tracks that seem to further, rather than revert, the band's foray/descent into mainstream pop-dom.

Lyrically, the songs seem constrained by the form. Words sound like they are selected for their rhyme, rather than for emotional, or any other kind of impact. Burn Burn doesn't sound like any other Our Lady Peace that I have heard (the only one's I haven't being Spiritual Machines and Healthy In Paranoid Times), and, to me, that's not a good thing.