Matthew Good Outshines Our Lady Peace At First Ontario Concert Hall (3/9/18)
Matthew Good’s new album “Something Like A Storm” was released on October 27th and debuted top 5 in Canada in 2018. The band has also been nominated for an incredible 21 Juno Awards.
Our Lady Peace has been one of the most successful bands in Canada. OLP has sold over 5 million albums worldwide and has won four Juno Awards.
Our Lady Peace and Matthew Good made their fifth stop of the ” Across Canada Tour” in Hamilton at the sold out First Ontario Concert Hall. The First Ontario Concert Hal is an intimate three level venue with outstanding acoustics and seats around 3000.
A cool feature about the concert hall is minutes before the act, a bell sounds. You hear an ominous voice over the PA,
“the act will begin in 5 minutes”.
The hall would repeat this at the 2 minute mark as well. I found this cool because it gives the audience time to get to their seats. It reminds you that you are in a concert hall, not an arena which is comforting for those of you who like small, intimate shows.
The Matthew Good Band took the stage at 8:00 pm. Their set was amazing and was a healthy mix of classics and new material from their album “Something Like A Storm”. Mid way through the set Good addressed the crowd,
” this place man, this place is really special. You know why I love playing here, the arches all white and shit on that angle look like an alien ship and I dig that”.
Good completed his set by rocking a personal favourite of mine “Load Me Up”.
He bowed and left the stage to a deafening applause.
It was Our Lady Peaces’ turn to grace the stage. It was hard to think that they could top Matthew Good. Our Lady Peace began the show by dropping mega hits such as “Superman is Dead” and “Innocent”. Frontman, Raine Maida decided after 5 songs or so to do an acoustic set. He spoke to the crowd about mental heath concluding with,
“we are all fucked up we all have problems we are all in repair”.
He then rolled into the song “Repair”. During their encore, Our Lady Peace brought Matthew Good and rocked “Hello Time Bomb”,which made the crowd go wild.
Before the show I overheard two people talking about the fact that Our Lady Peace should be opening for Matthew Good. I was a bit confused because I assumed that OLP would put on a better show than MG. After leaving the show I realized they were right, in terms of audience engagement and songs that fired up the crowd, Matthew Good outshone Our Lady Peace by a mile.
Overall, it was a a solid night of 90s nostalgic rock. I would definitely recommend going.
Chris Rooke
Content Director-Producer-Writer