Our Lady Peace @ Centennial Hall (March 15, 2010)

*As a note: this is what OLP looked like when I saw them last night, but I like to have pictures. Duncan had hair, Jeremy wasn't wearing glasses, Raine lost the beard, and Steve's hair looked a bit more like Jackson Rathbone's.

So here's the scoop with Our Lady Peace; they are my favourite band. "What?" you cry, knowing full well, due to your near-religious reading of this blog, that the band is currently only ranked at #46 on the Death By Hippopotamus "50 Greatest Artists Of All Time" list. But there is a difference. Being entirely objective, there are tons of albums and songs that I have thought were better than most of Our Lady Peace's, but once I allow subjectivity to come into things, I have, for the last ten years, when asked who my favourite band is, always answered that it is Our Lady Peace.

I, by no means, am suggesting that OLP is not a good band, as they certainly are. They epitomize, for me, everything that a four-piece band should be. They have
-a drummer who is competent and gracious,
-a bass player who connects with the audience, and sings along just because he loves the music he's playing
-a solid lead guitarist who is showy enough to grab your attention, but not going so far as to upstage
-a lead singer with a recognizable voice, who can nonetheless provide rhythm guitar (suggesting a deeper musical competence), the ability to connect to a crowd without resorting to too many shortcuts and easy pops, and an honest self-consciousness about his band.

If that last part sounds a little like a man-crush, you're not wrong. It's safe to say that frontman Raine Maida is a big reason for my fascination with this band. He is part of a trinity of men I wouldn't mind being. If I were an actor, I would want to be Nathan Fillion. If I were a (real) writer, I would want to be Chuck Klosterman. And, if I were a singer, I would want to be Raine Maida. He has an unstoppable, unique voice, and, assuming you don't hate the sound of it, is otherwise not too much of anything to turn anyone off.

Which brings us to the concert itself. For only the second time in my life, I was going to a show where I was intimately familiar with at least 80% of the music. The first such an occurrence was when I saw the Backstreet Boys last year, but even then, most of the material post-Black & Blue was new to me. On a personal level, this concert was a whole other experience, but I'll try to be objective for a moment.

The show began 20 minutes late, possibly due to thronging masses at the sorely understaffed merch table. As advertised, the show began with the band playing their second album, Clumsy in its entirety. Before the band took the stage, a video of Saul Fox (the guy from most of their album covers) played on a backdrop, wherein he recited poetry. This led into the album's opener (and one of their biggest hits), "Superman's Dead," which the crowd got into immediately.

Then came "Automatic Flowers," including an extra couple of bars of guitar solo. Throughout the rest of the show, most of the deviation from the recorded versions of songs came from Steve Mazur's guitar. As the only member who wasn't part of the band during its Clumsy era, Mazur has crafted his own idea of what the lead should sound like, still following the structure that Mike Turner had laid out, allowing for a slightly new experience of the songs. The only time it sounded unrecognizable was during the intro to "Hello Oskar," when I couldn't figure out what song was being played.

The band kept up what, at that point, seemed like a high amount of energy for hits and non-hits alike with the real high point coming when Maida gave some backstory for his inspiration for "4 A.M." After that introduction, the song itself gave me literal chills all the way through.

After the 50-odd minutes was up, Maida simply stated "and that's Clumsy, thank you" and left the stage. For a few minutes, I panicked that this was it. I wouldn't have been disappointed by the act itself, more that I had spent the equivalent of a dollar per minute of entertainment. Thankfully, this was simply a lengthy intermission, after which the band came back out in swanky new duds, with fog and strobe lights to spare.

At this point, I don't think anyone was disappointed by what they had just seen: a masterclass of a great rock album. Maida, apparently, thought differently, and, disappointingly, acted as though he was relieved that it was over, since he was ready to rock. Maybe it was merely out of showmanship, but his comments to that effect had an undermining effect on the intimacy of the first act. Nonetheless, he wasn't kidding about the mood changing, including his invitation for everyone to swarm to the front. Being 5'6", this was a move that I nearly immediately regretted, as tall folk, and drunk girls standing up on their seats in order to see over tall folk, hindered my view for a good 60% of the rest of the show.

With Clumsy over, the show truly became a rock concert, and the set took the form of hits, band favourites, and (a little too much) focus on their latest album, Burn Burn. During these more recent songs, the band, Maida, especially, was rocking harder than ever, determined to get their newest music heard. Whether this was overcompensation for the general weakness of the album, or an earnest appeal against its misunderstood reception remains to be seen.

As this second act went on, I started to get an idea of why I love Our Lady Peace as much as I do. During any song, I could look around me (since I couldn't see anything anyway) and see a multitude of reactions to the music. There were couples holding each other intimately, as though the band was the soundtrack to their relationship. There were older men who were rocking out hard enough to be practicing for the next Metallica show. There were older women who were moved by the music's lyricism, but seemed uncomfortable in the concert setting. It seemed that every person in the crowd had a different reason for being there and, the girlfriend sitting behind me whose boyfriend had brought her against her will aside (quote of the night: "I wouldn't buy you tickets to a band you hated, like Weezer"), none of those reasons were wrong or inappropriate. Simultaneously, the band was able to provide a unique meaning and enjoyment to nearly every member of the audience.

And maybe that's what went wrong with Burn Burn. As a simply laid-out series of songs, the band stripped itself of most of its vagueness and ambiguity, creating an album that, while deeply personal to the band, was unengaging to nearly everyone else. With this tour (which also features a second show, highlighting Spiritual Machines, Maida has claimed that in practicing older songs, the band has gotten in touch with something they have lost, and hope to regain. While recreation was the theme of the production of Burn Burn, I haven't given up hope that this time, the "back to our roots" direction is the real deal, and that Our Lady Peace remembers how to be competently undefinable.