1994 In Review: Our Lady Peace - "Naveed"
Regardless, imagine a time when unless your band was really lucky, chances were you'd only ever find success as a Canadian in Canada. Sure, there were a few artists flirting with American audiences by 1994; Crash Test Dummies had actually scored a couple of pretty substantial hits stateside, and a couple other bands had the good fortune of having one of their albums released in the U.S. only to never get another crack at it when sales didn't rival the success of their American peers. To be sure, as a Canadian rock band in the '90s it was a daunting enough task to be heard south of the 49th, let alone thrive. Even The Tragically Hip, beloved national treasures that they are, could not (or would not) capture the hearts of the American masses very far beyond the northern U.S. regions (where good chunks of the population consist of former Canadians).
To be sure, some very good Canadian bands had released some very good Canadian albums from 1991-93 (shout out to I Mother Earth, Headstones, The Hip, Odds), but on a spring day in 1994 the plates began to shift. Naveed, given a passing listen today, doesn't seem out of the ordinary in the slightest. Hell, Our Lady Peace would go on to make at least two better albums before they started dealing in diminishing returns. But as a debut album from a Canadian band, there was something very striking about it. Other Canadian bands had tried incorporating that prototypical '90s sound as a defense mechanism (to wit, 54-40 released Smilin' Buddha Cabaret, their most grunged up album, on the same day) to lesser effect, but Our Lady Peace did it with minimal effort and maximum results. That may be because they were born with that sound rather than forced by fear or short-sighted label greed to bend their sound toward it (anyone else remember the albums Sven Gali and Slik Toxik released in 1994-95?)
There's an energy present on Naveed that cuts deep, and is always threatening a meltdown that never happens; as often as Raine Maida's yelp approaches the point of annoyance and as often as Jeremy Taggart's snare ping begins to grate, the songs here are the strength. Boasting no less than five Canadian radio hits, there's no arguing the potency of a laser-guided strike like The Birdman or Starseed, the head-bobbing, driving rhythm of Supersatellite, the cathartic anthem Hope or the wholly engrossing title track. In fact, what's most telling about the quality of the songs is the fact that Naveed was the fifth single. And the truly scary part is that the quality doesn't drop that much on the album's B-side; tell me Denied, Julia or Neon Crossing wouldn't have been hits if they'd gone all Nickelback and released a few more to radio.
The success of Naveed here peaked the interest of American ears and, almost a year to the day after its Canadian release it hit U.S. shelves. It didn't match the quadruple platinum pace of Canadian sales but it did well enough commercially and critically to warrant another go down south (which is more than most bands of the time got). They wouldn't disappoint; follow-up Clumsy still stands as their biggest hit, on both sides of the border. At the time, it was the one of the only cases of a Canadian rock band sustaining and growing success outside of Canada since the '70s. Canadian rock was becoming a worldwide force again and, with the continuous stream of other bands achieving their dreams beyond our borders as the internet started blurring them, things would never be the same again.
March 22, 1994 • Sony Music Canada
Highlights The Birdman • Starseed • Naveed
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