This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Our Lady Peace. I Mother Earth. I’ve heard all the albums, seen all the videos, read all the bios. Yet to this day, sometimes I still have trouble remembering which is which. Turns out I’m not alone. On their fourth album, even I Mother Earth seem to be mixed up.
The Quicksilver Meat Dream — perhaps the goofiest album title since OLP’s Happiness Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch — finds the once-commercial foursome discarding their ripped blue jeans and post-grunge riffs for the puffy shirts and bong-hit absurdity of art-rock. All the prog signposts are here: Prime-number time signatures. Bombastic arrangements. Electronic squiggles. Charles Bukowski poetry. Eye-rollingly incomprehensible lyrics like, “Everyone’s an air flow through the blond dirt.” Over-reaching, over-long, chorus-free songs with titles like 0157:H7, Soft Bomb Salad and the eight-minute epic Meat Dreams: I. Umbilical Transmissions. II. We Be Nine. III. That’s Quite an Erection, Eric. IV. Blondes and Bluster.
The point? Some absurd malarky about birth and life and death and the subconscious and blah blah blah who cares anyway? Not me. And not anybody who dug songs like One More Astronaut. On the plus side, maybe Raine Maida and OLP will like Quicksilver Meat Dream enough that the two bands will merge into one pretentious supergroup — Our Lady Earth Peace Mother I, perhaps? — and save us all some confusion.
