Our Lady Peace
Clumsy
Sony
Opening slots for Page and Plant, Alanis and Van Halen take the pressure off a young band's sophomore album. As frankly as Our Lady Peace confronts the awkwardness of album No. 2 (Clumsy?), everyone in the Canadian rock industry knows this is an automatic.
As the three-hook title track climbs FM playlists in the coming weeks, they'll fit OLP between Alice in Chains and a half-dozen other tortured three-name bands. In arena alt-rock, where most singers disguise their agony in expressionistic jib-jab, it hardly seems fair to blame one who speaks plainly. Then again, Raine Maida sings "I blame my father for the wasted years / We hardly talked." It's all so unfair.
We have long since passed the moment when venting over tribe-o-matic drums and push-pull guitars signified anything of import in and of itself. In a world of copies, each one blurrier than the previous, it'll take songs and a smidgen of originality to get the attention of anyone beyond '70s rockers who feel legitimized by this stuff.
There are some songs here, and a carnival coloring to the quite good playing, but Raine Maida's version of the broken ventriloquist dummy of childhood trauma sounds like more FM fodder. The band supertorques the angst up in Story of 100 Aisles, and if you listen carefully, you can hear the echo of the Molson Centre's hallways in it. The Sam Phillips of today says: "If I could find me a young white band with unhappy memories and David Coverdale's record collection, I could make me a billion dollars."