Thunderous, loud love for Our Lady Peace at 30 By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 11:24 PM CST Friday, Feb. 28, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/02/2025 (508 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Be in a band long enough, and you’ll start hitting milestones. The reunion tour. The farewell tour, usually preceded by the “farewell” tour. Occasionally, the “this is our new lead singer” tour.

And if you’re lucky, the anniversary tour.

Our Lady Peace is currently on its OLP30 Tour, which rolled through Winnipeg Friday night — a look back that began last year with a trio of releases commemorating the 30th anniversary of the release of Naveed, the band’s 1994 lighting-in-a-bottle debut.

Anniversary tours can be a tricky needle to thread for a band that’s still actively making new music.

Some bands fear becoming a nostalgia act. Others are leery of leaning too heavily on the hits that made them famous because to do so is to suggest their best work may be behind them — but, at the same time, no one wants to have their new artistic growth met by a blank-faced audience thinking, “cool, but when are you gonna play the song that I like?” Every band has its Free Bird.

But done right, and the anniversary tour is a celebration. And that’s what thousands of fans were doing at Canada Life Centre Friday night: celebrating 30 years of one of Canada’s most enduring alternative rock bands.

And Our Lady Peace understood the assignment, giving them exactly what they wanted with a high-energy show that struck a nice balance between looking forward and looking back.

“I’m not a big reminiscing guy,” Maida admitted four songs in, “but tonight that’s what we’re gonna do.”

Taking the stage after a short career highlight reel — MuchMusic appearances, Woodstock ’99 — played on the triptych of screens behind the spartan stage, the band — frontman Raine Maida, bassist Duncan Coutts, percussionist Jason Pierce, and guitarist Steve Mazur — fittingly kicked things off with Naveed’s title track, its rumbling bassline practically shaking the arena off its foundation.

OLP is thunderously loud, to be sure, but Maida’s voice never sounded like he was fighting for his life. And 30 years on, he’s still got it — the yelps, the falsettos — that singular voice was on full display on their titanic hit Superman’s Dead off 1997’s sophomore album Clumsy (which was the second song in the set).

As to be expected at a show like this, there was quite a bit of fan karaoke — especially on Is Anybody Home? and Life — but it fit with the spirit of the show. After spending seven songs in the ’90s and early aughts, OLP performed the spiky new single Sound the Alarm which feels like a return to form for the band.

A sweet mid-show surprise came right at press time in the form of a tribute to “the band that changed my life”: a hard-charging cover of The Tragically Hip’s Locked in the Trunk of a Car. Maida didn’t do a Gord Downie impression; instead OLP made the song their own.

It’s fairly rare for a show to gain steam in the second half, but it was clear OLP was just getting started. A blistering performance of Whatever — a deepest of deep cuts that became unfortunately associated with Canadian wrestler Chris Benoit, who used it as his theme song before he murdered his family before taking his own life in 2007 — was followed by a soaring Somewhere Out There.

Clumsy closed the main set — and yielded the loudest crowd response — before Maida decamped to the B-stage to take the piano for beautiful solo renditions of Not Enough and 4 a.m., which ended with a bang on the mainstage with the rest of the band.

The band could have left it there, but it had two more. The 103-minute set concluded with a pair of scorchers: Automatic Flowers and, kicking it back to 1994, Starseed.

We’re all a little older now — the main floor had chairs — but I bet everyone in that arena has an Our Lady Peace song that takes them right back. This reviewer was in junior high when Clumsy was huge and everyone would scrawl OLP all over their binders (and sometimes their jeans) in blue ballpoint and awkwardly sway to 4 a.m. at community-centre dances.

It was nice to revisit that time through these songs, just for a night.

Georgia rock band Collective Soul (which formed in 1992, around the same time as OLP) got the nostalgia train rolling, cranking out a veritable greatest hits package — Heavy, Shine (which included the audience gamely taking over its signature “yeahs”, and a little interlude of Aerosmith’s Living on the Edge), Precious Declaration, December, Gel — to an appreciative crowd.

Frontman Ed Roland — who was clearly more comfortable when he had a guitar strapped to him — often let the crowd take the lead, but when his voice was on, it was on. The World I Know was a knockout. (The hammy cover of AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap was deeply unnecessary, as most AC/DC covers are.)

Los Angeles-via-Vancouver indie quartet Hotel Mira — who played the West End Cultural Centre when it was in Winnipeg last year — opened the night with a tight set that saw frontman Charlie Kerr working that stage like he plays arenas every night.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com