Band Our Lady Peace Falls Flat on Latest Album
By:  Amanda Amselr
September 28, 2005
The News Record

Who remembers the early '90s and the great music that it brought? You know, the Pre-Brittany; the Pre-Pop-Dominated days. When MTV used to play music instead of sad reality shows and when the icons of the time were Nirvana and Sublime?

Our Lady Peace, the Canadian rock band well known for the hit song "Clumsy," definitely remembers those times because that is when they made their mark on American society.

A few weeks ago, on Aug. 30, one whole, yet short decade after the band released their debut album Naveed, they released another album Healthy In Paranoid Times. Even though Our Lady Peace has come out with an array of albums since their debut, this album stands out from all the rest.

Healthy In Paranoid Times captures all the essence you would expect of Our Lady Peace including their characteristic sound and vocals, but something is missing.

This album, by lead vocalist Raine Maida, guitarist Steve Mazur, bassist Duncan Coutts, and drummer Jeremy Taggart is a mere shell of the cult following they used to instill with their music.

Hit singles like "Starseed" of the Naveed album are what made Our Lady Peace famous and captured the post-grunge sound for which they have always strived. However, today their sound is more like that of an immature boy who is crying like a baby over a girl.

And each song is worse than the one before.

Now, realizing that this is a strong opposition for a band that has been loved by so many for a decade, it can only be backed up with solid evidence.

And to avoid hate-mail from hardcore Our Lady Peace fans, here is why this is, by far, not their best work. On track five of Healthy In Paranoid Times, Maida repeats the lyrics "I am gonna wipe that smile right off your face," "I am gonna make you pay," so creatively he titles the song "Wipe that smile off your face".

Now this wouldn't be a bad song, if the rest of the songs didn't have the same theme.

For example, track 10 "Don't Stop," Maida is singing to a lover, saying that they are bad for him and that he needs to get away from them.

Then he comes back saying immediately in the lyric "Don't stop sucking me in/making me comeback to you." Then at the end of the song he says, "No one will ever be better than you/ healthy and paranoid/no one will ever be better than you".

And in a certain way that makes sense because that is real life. You love someone so much, then it is over and one still wants the other, even though they know they are going to get hurt again.

It's alright to talk about emotions, love and being hurt, but there is more to life, and certainly more to selling albums.

It simply doesn't work as the message being expressed to your audience when you are "supposed" to be a post-grunge band not a pop band.

It is a shame that someone hurt all the members of the band so that they had to sell-out and make cheesy pop music, when you are suppose to be a music icon of a time for rock and roll.

In listening to Healthy In Paranoid Times a sad realization that the pop disease had inflicted even the purest of bands and stirs a reminder of why Canadian bands usually fail to impress.