Raine Maida of OLP under the spotlight
Last night Char and I went to see Our Lady Peace do their first of two shows here in London. The shows are a pretty cool concept, the first night they play the entire 1997 album Clumsy, and on the second night they play the entire 2000 album Spiritual Machines.
After reading some pretty good reviews of the shows in Toronto at Massey Hall on Friday and Saturday, I was pretty pumped about the show here. Clumsy is one of my favourite albums of the 90’s, and it was released during a pivotal time in my life when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I’ve seen Our Lady Peace twice before. Once at Edgefest (or Lolapalooza), and once in London at the Western Fair. Both shows were pretty good, but last night’s rocked the house.
Centennial Hall is a pretty crappy venue. It’s a long hall with balconies on the side. The walls are concrete and floor is hardwood. This means that sound bounces everywhere, the high end is static, the low end is booming, and the mid-ranges are virtually non-existent.
With that said, the show was itself was great, and even though a lot of Raine’s vocals got lost in many of the songs, the atmosphere was spectacular.
The first hour of the show was the entire album Clumsy played in order, a couple of my favourite OLP songs are on there including Automatic, 4am, and of course Superman’s Dead.
Following a 30 minute intermission, and a change of scenery (gone was the sheet that had videos playing on it, and in were some super bright LED lights), the band came back and played a set of favourites from the rest of their albums. After opening up with Monkey Brains, Raine told the crowd “Come on, this is a rock show,” he pointed at the balcony “You don’t sit down at a rock show! All you people in the back, get up to the front. This place was quiet as a church for the first hour, let’s make some noise!”
Over the next hour, OLP played a ton of awesome tunes including a semi-acoustic version of Is Anybody Home where the audience sang the chorus and the band played harmony…which was chilling in it’s awesomeness.
For the encore they did a little alpha and omega action by playing the new song All You Did Was Save My Life, and finishing off the show with Starseed from their first album.
It was a terrific evening, and despite the kind of crappy venue, let the two of us recapture a little bit of our lost youth, if only for a few moments.