Our Lady Peace Tries Too Hard to Express Pain

Our Lady Peace is yet another in a long line of bands that seeks catharsis through plodding power chords and vein-bursting vocals. Already a huge draw in its native Canada, the quartet has recently infiltrated U.S. airwaves with “Clumsy,” a song whose lilting melody sounds uncomfortably like Oasis’ “Wonderwall” but whose elliptical lyrics sketch a portrait of unbearable psychic pain.

Pain and emotional dislocation were the subjects du jour during the band’s set Thursday at the Hollywood Athletic Club. Virtually all of Our Lady Peace’s songs focus on outsiders who teeter on the precipice between hope and despair, and are looking for either succor or escape. Taken individually, the band’s material has the cheap emotional charge of good suburban arena rock, but on Thursday, it just came off as turgid and forced.

Not that the band doesn’t give its all on stage. Our Lady Peace’s songs, like their alt-rock forebears, are calibrated to surge and crest at the appropriate moments; quiet passages swelled into pealing guitar noise, then reverted back again. Vocalist Raine Maida is a fairly dexterous singer who’s capable of instantly switching from an adenoidal growl into a chirping falsetto, but he doesn’t yet have either the stage presence or the chops to be a compelling frontman. And his between-song banter was entirely bereft of offhanded irony or humor. The only moment of levity came at the tail end of the set with a cover of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” but by then it was too little, too late.

Opening act Black Lab churned out stately guitar-rock and sang seriously wimpy lyrics about unrequited love with stern expressions on the band members’ faces. Like Our Lady Peace, the group was just a little too self-important for its own good.