EDMONTON -- Can the Raine man still entertain after more than a decade? Why yes, thanks for asking. And while those of us who danced near enough to Our Lady Peace's handsome Mr. Maida to give the devil sign to the cross around his neck, everyone else in the Oiler bowl last night got to actually hear him, seeing as the sound was floating some 20 feet above us at ground zero.
Oh, go on and write your letters about how great the mix was - you're wrong, though. Still, and it's a big still, Toronto's Our Lady Peace sits on a big fat collection of excellent radio songs, and the boys squeezed through the hits like juice boxes. So it's OK if you drove all the way from Camrose, you got your money's worth, thanks to a pretty packed agenda of music and dippy comedy from the hoser Trailer Park Boys. It was fun to watch up close, those big KISS lights and Maida's belly, which he exposed as much as possible. So what if the band spent the whole time posing for the cameras filming their next DVD? Just because Maida spent about a third of the time twisted around in self-conscious crucified poses as if God found him in the laundry hamper, wading into the crowd for One Man Army a little forcefully and doing his best Bono impersonation during a rousing Life from Spiritual Machines, doesn't mean he wasn't actually there, if you take my meaning. He played for the cameras, yes, but we got to see it, too.
And unlike a lot of people out there in the "world," I dig his voice. How strange it is that this band would survive so long post-grunge - but the excesses of Pearl Jam and Nirvana are well-known stories not needing telling here.
Let's talk instead about the opening bands for a bit. Seether started things up - sort of. The South African band was like a warm embrace letting us know that, yes, even so far away, most bands sound painfully the same as Nickelback. And where was the seething? The band should really be called Soother, they were dull as nails driven into the Incredible Hulk and the lead singer looked like Meat Loaf, not the kind you eat (I assume).
They kind of came back in the end, but who cares: Bubbles, Julian and Ricky of the Trailer Park Boys hawked the virtues of drinking, pot, bumming smokes and, um, kitties, while goofy George Bush was letting the rest of the world know who was now part of his collection of dang "outlaw regimes." Yay!
After his buddies tried to light one up in the Oilers dressing room, Bubbles, a grown man in very thick soda-bottle glasses, sang a country song that went like this: "Every day I thank the Lord and maybe Jesus as well, for helping to turn my shed into a kitty cat hotel." Very weird stuff, very nice boys.
Actually, before that happened, Finger 11 came out with the first real pop tart of energy of the night, thanks especially to the guitar gymnastics of Rich Beddoe, basically Alice Cooper on a Tilt-a-Whirl. The singer, Scott Anderson, is a good-looking giant baby man, bald as a bingo ball, and they rocked beyond my expectations, these former Rainbow Butt Monkeys (couldn't resist). They sewed it up with First Time, a nice and heavy one for anyone with ears in the audience.
OLP then. Raine looked great on this boys night, showing off his underwear a lot, and they did old songs like Naveed and Superman's Dead, the AI-E-AI-E-AI-E song, which is 12 years old now and slightly better than new songs like the mournful Not Enough. Maida philosophized about menfolk: "The real problem is we usually don't know when we have a good thing. The grass is not always greener on the other side." Amen, brother. But it sure feels nice to sleep on now and then anyway, eh boys? I'm gonna get in trouble for that one. Then Bring Back the Sun, another gooder. And, of course, Innocent, which spawned a massive singalong.
In other words, people were happy. And it's not like we weren't mugging for the panning cameras ourselves, right?
IN THE SEATS: 8,000 in Skyreach
HIGH NOTE: Raine doing One Man Army
SOUR NOTE: The muddy sound JAM! Rating: 3.5 out of 5
(More on Our Lady Peace)
