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Here Fishy Fishy...

by Spencer Ross

I remember seeing Our Lady Peace perform on Third Eye Blind's Bonfire Tour in Wallingford, CT in 1998. By then, they had 2 albums and I knew about 4 songs off them. But it wasn't til a few months before the concert that I found out that they were a Canadian band. I supposed there's something about them that I should have recognized it. Seeing them in concert wasn't bad, but they didn't overly impress me. Their music was definitely mainstream alternative, nothing fancy. It had a good sound, but nothing original about it, other than lead singer Raine Maida's whiny voice.

Same goes for their latest album, Happiness is Not a Fish...That You Can Catch (title length coming in close second to Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish, and Fiona Apple's When the Pawn...). It's a lot of good music as an album, riddled with catchy pop-alternative rock songs, but nothing with any balls. The drum beats on almost every song are the same, the only thing that changes is the chord progression. It'd be kind of hard to tell when a new song came on if they got rid of the guitar part. OLP's uniqueness comes from the whine of Raine Maida, who goes from low pitch to high whine. At times it works, at other times it doesn't. As with most vocalists, he writes the words, with some decent lyrics about losing friends ("One Man Army") and searching for something, someone ("Is Anybody Home?"). With some cynicism, he sings "Woke to sounds/I prayed you were there/I fell back down/But I'm sure you still care" ("Waited"). My favorite song though, is "Thief," which is about Maida wanting to be there for a friend of his, even through the weird circumstances that his friend might be undergoing.

Happiness... sounds like an extension of "Clumsy" and "4am" with nothing really variant from the styles of those two songs. I suppose if a band is meant to have a certain sound, then this one has already found it and is sticking with it. Definitely doesn't show anything in the means of growth, though it's just catchy enough that you wouldn't mind sticking it in your CD player for 50 min. I supposed though that if you want to save yourself some money, just buy this 3 star album since it's new, and then you can spare yourself spending on their previous two albums.

11/27/00