Our Lady PeaceHealthy in Paranoid TimesSounds Like: Coldplay rejectsDecibels: 40

Hey, did you know it took 58 packages of guitar strings to make the new Our Lady Peace album? Two thousand hours to ‘discuss and play music?’ Eleven thousand dollars (Canadian) to feed the band? One thousand, one hundred and sixty-five days ‘were needed’ to record in all!

That’s a kind of pretension usually reserved for Billy Corgan, not Raine Maida.

Maida’s band, Our Lady Peace, releases its sixth (and weakest) studio album today, ‘Healthy in Paranoid Times.’ We don’t get any lyrics in the liner notes, merely witty factoids like those above.

While never renowned for a defining sound in their previous albums, each was held together by smart song-writing and slick production. No one would identify OLP as being revolutionary musicians, but they certainly could turn out a solid product. And in the case of 1999’s ‘Spiritual Machines,’ the group was able to make a concept album that was smart without being full of itself.

‘Healthy’ is a giant step backward for Canada’s defining modern rock band (a title they can safely claim). It sounds less like a mature sixth album and more like a first-time Coldplay wannabe. The liner notes are filled with references to how many soldiers died in Iraq vs. how many civilians died in Dafur vs. how much TV the average child in North America watches. There are links to the Web sites of Greenpeace, Amnesty International and CorpWatch (irony alert: the CD is distributed by Sony Corporation). The notes also brag that it took 10 studios, 43 songs and 6000 gigabytes of hard drive space to get it just perfect.

And all they have to show for it is this mess?

Gone are the soaring choruses, replaced by awkward starts for what sounds like a Hoobastank song. Gone is the production that held previous albums together, replaced by a disjointed collection of so-so songs. And, most importantly, gone is the fun. There are a few exceptions like ‘Walking in Circles,’ which remind me of the band’s best work, but the rest is mostly pretentious drivel. As Our Lady Peace they rocked, but as Coldplay wannabes it takes only 362 words to explain why they fail.

Published on September 18, 2005 at 12:00 pm