Acts of Volition

My opinions on Our Lady Peace vary wildly. On one hand, songs like Julia and Naveed from their first album, Naveed are truly great songs. They have impressed me in concert when I expected to be bored on several occasions: Letting six thousand people sing 4AM from start to finish; Hearing them cover the late Jeff Buckley's song Eternal Life at dusk under a full moon; Playing a piano version of Julia they heard from a fan (this one is on schmaptser if you are a thief). These are good concert moments. The last time I saw them, I felt like I was an oldie-olson, since everyone else in the arena was a big-pants 14 year old (most of them passing around one communal joint). As we waited for the concert to start, I was seriously regretting attending, but once they took the stage, they impressed me once again.

On the other hand, I find Raine Maida (OLP's singer) to be a pompous Bono / Thom Yorke wannabe. He is quite good at handling a stadium (a noteworthy skill for a rock star). However, he sometimes goes a little too far. At one concert, he had the audience in the palm of his hands until he went on an aside about how “it's all about the music”. Dude, look in the mirror and repeat three times: “I am not Bono”.

I can assure you that my opinions are not at all swayed by the time Raine closed an elevator door in Matt's face (ask him about it, he'll be glad to tell you).

Anyway, Now that you have my personal history of Our Lady Peace, I am going somewhere with this. Their new album, Spiritual Machines, is based on the book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil. This guy has an impressive resume:

• invented the first text-to-speech machine in 1976
• invented the CCD (flat-bed scanner) in 1975
• invented the first font-indepented optical character recognition (OCR) in 1976
• invented the first useful musical synthesizer in 1984

Kurzweil has also written on the subject of artificial intelligence. While I haven't read Spiritual Machines yet, it's in the mail. The flash animation currently on the front page of ourladypeace.com elegantly illustrates the transition point at which the resolution of a digital medium exceeds our ability to perceive. View the animation »

Our Lady Peace has also made a Napter-savvy marketing move. They have seeded Napster with full copies of the new album, only with a few voice-overs (from Ray Kurzweil himself, actually) identifying the album in each song. It's not so much that you can't enjoy the song, but enough that if you wanted to keep it, you'd still have to buy the real thing.

My point, if I have one, is that Our Lady Peace have done something somewhat interesting in their interpretation of Kurzweil's book in a pop album.

I should also thank Our Lady Peace for bringing me the unlikely opportunity to see the worlds greatest and most underrated band, Catherine Wheel, at Summersault in Halifax last year.