August 21, 2009 - Our Lady Peace Climb The Walls
By Al Shipley

Toronto's Our Lady Peace is, like most Canadian bands, much bigger in its home country than in America. Though the band has had a fair amount of success on American radio, Our Lady Peace appears to carry a sense of its diminished status here with it when touring the states. Monday night at the 9:30 Club in Washington, frontman Raine Maida repeatedly thanked the audience for "remembering us" in the four years since the band's last album. The band opened with a crowd-pleasing block of songs that included two of its biggest hits, "Superman's Dead" and "Clumsy," as well as "Innocent," which is now perhaps best known for being butchered by David Cook on American Idol. But when it was time to showcase tracks from the band's recently released album Burn Burn, Maida somewhat sheepishly asked permission to play some new songs.



The insecurity, or at least the mock-humble routine, if that's what it was, really wasn't necessary. Our Lady Peace may have been one a gazillion major-label bands to crop up in the wake of grunge in the mid-'90s, but it's one of the few from the era that shares more kinship with a band like U2, unafraid to be a little more grandiose and spiritual and touchy-feely. That sensibility, combined with the band's experience playing larger venues up north, gives its club shows an emotive sense of spectacle that suits its big riffs and soaring choruses. Maida's voice, always swinging between the extremes of a low, nasal croak and an expressive wail, is an odd instrument, but it's also the band's greatest asset. Still, he knew when to let the audience take the lead and sing the chorus to "4 A.M." or the wicked falsetto hook on "Is Anybody Home?"

But the shot in the arm that made the show truly memorable was at the end of the band's set, during the current single "All You Did Was Save My Life," when Maida decided to climb up to the balcony on the right side of the room, something I've never seen anyone attempt in my decade of seeing shows at the 9:30. It may be a pretty standard rock-star stunt, but the leaping and climbing it took to get up there, and the fact that the club's staff looked genuinely freaked out, made it a pretty thrilling moment to cap what was already a pretty great show. Even when the band returned to the stage for an encore that included perhaps its best song, the 1995 breakthrough "Starseed," it was clear the climax of the night had already occurred.
- Citypaper.com


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