Remember grunge? It’s back… in pog form!
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[3.25]
Brad Shoup: Tonight’s top story: Canadian midsized-arena band records socialist sea shanty, becomes 500th act to translate heartbeats into drum rhythm. Structure remains airtight, enunciation crisp, cadence infectious. UPDATE: Lead singer testifies he doesn’t mean to seem like he cares about material things like social stats.
[5]
Sally O’Rourke: Hey, did you know there’s bad stuff happening in the world right now? Nickelback do. They don’t know what, exactly, but they’re pretty sure it can be solved with a redo of Hands Across America. And to prove they really mean it, they’ve brought along a mandolin.
[1]
Alfred Soto: The zealous mixing (the drums sound like a starving man getting slapped by the back of a hand) and mulitracked yea-yeas evoke Whitesnake produced as if they were Hysteria-era Def Leppard, which suits the zealously proclaimed solidarity embraced by the lyrics. However, its pompousness is thought through. I remain an agnostic, but I believe that they believe. Their best single.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Nickelback judiciously (two words never used consecutively until now, Google it) loops the background yeahs throughout the whole song; they, and the acoustic guitar, approach pretty. They also approach “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” but you have to grade on a curve here.
[5]
Iain Mew: This is easily the more bearable of the two singles. I suppose the “Wonderwall” + “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” verses at least aren’t just ripping off old Nickelback songs and I have an inexplicable soft spot for clunky meta stuff like “and the drum beat carries on.” The starving world/empty words lines are just embarrassing though, and there’s barely a scrap of inspiration in the whole bloated thing.
[3]
Jer Fairall: Big shiny Goo Goo Dolls-like acoustics, a thumping and, dare I say, almost clubby beat, and nary a hint of misogyny — this is so not the Nickelback that I know and hate. If you’re gonna mess with your usual schtick, though, it’s generally better to have a clearer idea of what the hell it is you’re actually doing, rather than cobble together an assortment of vaguely Inspirational platitudes applicable to anything and nothing in particular. Are we to support the troops? Are we to think war is bad? Are we to just keep on keepin’ on? I don’t know, and I’m sure I don’t care.
[2]
Jonathan Bradley: I’d celebrate the frothy and folky acoustic guitar that opens the song if only it weren’t underpinned by queasy bass and a leaden boogie of a backbeat. In better hands it would have ended up as — gosh, a middling Collective Soul single? Chad Kroeger’s singularly awful rasp can always be counted on to make a bad song less bearable, and I’d have taken points off for the half-assed drum breakdown of the bridge, except there aren’t that many points to begin with. This band exists to demonstrate that collective wisdom is not always wrong.
[2]
Doug Robertson: This is more what you’d expect from Nickelback — well, ultimately they’re both what you would expect; they’re not a band who are about to start flirting with any unusual rhythms any time soon, let alone glitchtronica — designed to fill stadiums in the same way that foam insulation fills the gaps in your walls. It’s not music to enjoy or savour or excite or interest or dance to or do any of the sorts of things that music should actually do; its just there to kill time until they do the one about being a rock star and hopefully sell a few t-shirts at the same time. They’d better be some amazing t-shirts.
[2]