 With a new, long-awaited album finally hitting stores, Our Lady Peace played the Roxy last week before a crowd of loyal followers.
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 Our Lady Peace frontman Rain Maida didn´t bring any stormy weather to the stage.
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Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida openly wondered whether his band's following would still be there after it was forced to wait more than three years between new albums.
If Maida had asked anyone in the packed crowd at the Roxy last Monday night, they probably would have responded with his own words:
"No matter what you say / no matter you do / no matter what / I'm always right there behind you."
For many fans, Gravity, released in June of 2002, was a distant memory. Our Lady Peace, touring in support of its new album, Healthy In Paranoid Times, proved to them that the wait was definitely worth it.
After opening with the obligatory cut from the new record (in this case, "Picture," a lyrically mellow piece), Maida and company unleashed a hard, loud, and fast rendition of one of their first hits, "Starseed."
Fans, who a song before seemed to be concentrating intently on learning the words and picking up the melody, were suddenly off their feet and screaming the lyrics of the old, familiar standby.
Conspicuously absent from an otherwise balanced set list were any songs from 1999's Happiness Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch.
Perhaps it might have been too much to ask, considering that Happiness is by far Our Lady Peace's most cerebral, most experimental album, but it did have some pretty awesome tunes. If anything from this show could be called a disappointment, it would be the lack of songs like "Is Anybody Home?" or "The Consequence of Laughing."
It was a small disappointment, though, since the band indulged fans with some old favorites. Songs like "Clumsy," "In Repair," "Innocent," and "Car Crash" were scattered between new tracks. Maida even played to the blue state crowd. "Am I safe here?" he asked. "This isn't Bush country, is it?" Maida was met with thunderous cheering as he went into the anti-Bush anthem, "Wipe That Smile Off Your Face."
The first two acts were typical opening act fare.
Joel Shearer of the Los Angeles-based Pedestrian played what must have seemed to the people slowly filing into the room to be a glorified sound check.
Shearer was followed by Danko Jones, Canadian rockers just like Our Lady Peace, but with a much harder, more ballsy rock sound than the headliners.
The band's frontman (coincidently also named Danko Jones) got into it with a group of hecklers who apparently didn't appreciate his last performance in Providence.
"I'll give you four all-access passes," said Jones, in the same grating, intimidating voice he used to sing songs like "Play the Blues" and "I Love Living in the City."
"Then I'll deal with all four of you personally backstage." Who knows whether Jones made good on his promise, but the crowd got a kick out of the threats.
The show rocked, in the truest and least cliché sense of the word, right down to the double encore, where Our Lady Peace played some of its greatest hits.
They started with its breakthrough single "Superman's Dead," and followed up with another gem from Clumsy.
In a tremendous show of fan appreciation, Maida let the crowd belt out a passionate rendition of "4 a.m." Our Lady Peace closed the show with "World on a String," one of the better songs from the new album, and the hit single from Gravity, "Somewhere Out There."
Sadly, Our Lady Peace's tour is moving south and west throughout the country in October.
Even marginal fans would be well-advised to try to see them before the tour is over.
Not only does the band put on an incredible show, but their Web site almost seems to brag, "1,165 days were needed to record Healthy In Paranoid Times," so who knows when another album and another tour will come out.
Spring Break
