RAINE MAIDA + Billy the Kid @ Club Soda

By Georgia Wisdom-Kuhns - MoonRocks - 03/26/2008

True story. Raine Maida fans are the worst dressed people in Canada. Before last night's show at Club Soda, I wasn't aware it was possible for one to turn their comb over into a mohawk, or that sweatpants and leather boots were considered a winning combination. Raine Maida fans are also, apparently, the horniest people in Canada. For the majority of the opening acts (Ontario's Billy the Kid and my own personal version of hell: A beat poet from Providence who thinks the U.S. planned 9/11), I witnessed three couples making out in direct line of sight. Some of them were old, and there was butt grabbing.

Moving on.

Raine Maida is pretty much a national icon. Canadian kids in the 90s grew up listening to his music, and you'd be hard pressed to find a twenty-something in this country that doesn't keep a copy of Clumsy in their glove box. That being said, I think it’s fair to admit that Maida's 2007 solo effort, The Hunter's Lullaby, is a pile. Save for the first single, "Yellow Brick Road," which is a pretty innocent and uplifting track about the freedom of being young, the rest of the record is almost unlistenable. With cringe worthy lyrics like "she was sweet like honey and sour like democracy" running rampant throughout the album's ten tracks, it’s pretty much the musical equivalent of getting hammed in the face.

But apparently I was the only one at Club Soda last night who thought this. Oh my God are Montrealers crazy about Raine Maida. When he emerged on stage, accompanied by a drummer, a cellist and wife Chantal Kreviazuk on the keys, the place went crazy. And not just girls, but guys as well were screaming at the top of their lungs, "RAINE I LOVE YOU. RAINE MAIDA I LOVE YOU," for such a length of time that even Maida himself was a little weirded out.

The set list for the night was fairly typical. Done all on acoustic guitar, Raine played almost all of the songs of his new album, with a few surprises like covers of Neil Young and Billy Talent's "Try Honesty". In between songs he talked about his various charities, and raised the question of whether or not the figure of the guitarist could still bring change to the world. The answer was a grim maybe.

The highlight of the show, I think it everyone's minds, was Kreviasuk's haunting rendition of The Pixies' classic "Where is My Mind?" While slightly Canadianafied, I think it was a respectful and loving tribute that even the most die hard Pixies fans could have got behind.

As the night went on, I kept waiting for Maida to bust out an Our Lady Peace track, but to my dismay, this didn't happen until the encore, when he played only one, "Innocent," the second worst Our Lady Peace song in existence (second only to "Somewhere Out There"). But still the crowd exploded and sung along -- which led me to believe that the fans of yesteryear, the fans that grew up on Naveed and Clumsy weren't there that night. The fans of Hunter's Lullaby with its cheeseball lyrics and too blatant anti-Capitalist sentiment are a newer generation of Raine Maida fans, that from what I could tell from the heartfelt sing along, came in around the time of Our Lady Peace's 2002 effort, Gravity, their only album to achieve commercial success in the United States, and ironically, also the album hated most by diehard OLP fans. Gravity lacked the pure heavy rock, head banging vibe of the band's former records, replacing it with contrived political themes and predictable sounds. I felt disappointed, and wondered if the Raine Maida I used to love so much growing up, was gone.

Yet as the show ended, in a move seen at almost every Our Lady Peace show, the former frontman took the microphone and climbed with shocking Spiderman-like agility into the balcony where he sung with fans, held the microphone out to the crowd and to a frenzy of camera flashes, disappeared into the darkness, only to reemerge on stage moments later to say goodbye and thank you.

On the way home, I listened to the Pixies.

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