Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 1/5 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida takes a dour turn as a humourless activist on the acoustic singer/songwriter set, The Hunter’s Lullaby, but for a man who’s gone to such lengths to rediscover himself as a political artist, his album is oddly lacking in true protest songs.
Most of the space on Lullaby, which borrows its name from a Leonard Cohen song, is taken up by either stories of Maida’s childhood (lead single ‘Yellow Brick Road’) or oblique and unidentified threats to society (pretty much everything else). The album is littered with defiant language for defiance’s sake, but never steps up and addresses directly what Maida is evidently so angry about.
In an effort to create a focused record with a singular theme, Maida instead made a record about nothing, but it’s the seriousness with which he sings about nothing that is most disconcerting. Maida’s trademark nasally drawl is made even murkier by a presumably pained expression on his face. Activism and social protest has provided some of the best music ever made, but there’s nothing worse than an activist who doesn’t know what he’s acting out against.
