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**1/2 OUR LADY PEACE

SPIRITUAL MACHINES

(Columbia)

Now that they’ve made it all the way to album #4, generic Canadian arena-rockers Our Lady Peace have certainly earned the right to do a concept album. The starting point here is Orwellian blowhard Ray Kurzweil’s recent book The Age of Spiritual Machines, whose subtitle (“When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence” — 2029 by his estimate) pretty much says it all. The band go so far as to recruit Kurzweil to do a voiceover, which is integrated into the disc as a series of quasi-musical between-song snippets. But beyond that, they don’t let the concept weigh them down much: if anything, their songs are more concise than usual, and singer Raine Maida sounds less hysterical than he has in the past. Where-have-you-gone- Jonny-Greenwood art-guitar parts aside, deep-thinking MOR standouts like “Life” land squarely on the Third Eye Blind side of the pop/rock division. As usual, Maida has plenty of songs for the ladies, among them the stellar falsetto-enhanced heartbreaker “Are You Sad?” OLP’s peculiarly Canadian mix of pre-metal alternative rock and classic Britpop may seem a little quaint in this day and age, but their increasingly refined sound is getting harder to brush aside by the album.

— Sean Richardson