Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 3/5 Released: August 30, 2005 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
Dating back over a decade, Our Lady Peace has been one of the staples of the Can-Rock music scene. For a good chunk of that time, they were quietly a very good band, but had little success outside of Canada. In 2002, they decided to go knock on the big door to the south. Enlisting heavyweight producer Bob Rock, the band released Gravity, a straight ahead radio rock album, and while the album brought them more success in the U.S. than they were used to, it was also the most boring music of their career – something which frontman Raine Maida has come just shy of fessing up to in recent interviews. With that out of their system, the band returns with Healthy in Paranoid Times. While Bob Rock was used again, the album is a monumental improvement on Gravity. The band explores their increasing political viewpoints, and gets reacquainted with their charmingly quirky melodies.
The album still isn’t bullet-proof. After opening with four solid tracks, including lead single Where Are You, the album crashes hard with its most overtly political song, Wipe That Smile Off Your Face. The song feels like its building to something, but never gets there – it just plods along with the most predictable and boring melody on the album. The album’s saving grace is the surprising World on a String, an uncharacteristically upbeat song on which the band channels R.E.M. by disguising a sort of cynical pessimism amongst a happy-go-lucky melody.
While this isn’t OLP’s worst effort, it certainly isn’t their best, and one fact remains the same. Raine Maida just can’t sing. God bless him for trying, but even when his voice is stretched just slightly off-centre, he loses all sense of tone. It’s a very distracting feature of every OLP record, and one that makes Healthy in Paranoid Times a difficult listen.
