The Canadian hard rock band takes a formulaic approach that pairs straightforward chords with gruff vocals. Singer-guitarist Chad Kroeger will sing a line and guitarist-keyboardist-backing vocalist Ryan Peake will repeat the line and inject a few lines of his own. Very little separates hits such as “How You Remind Me” and “Someday.”
And yet, somehow, someway, the band has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide since forming 20 years ago. According to Billboard, Nickelback event holds the title as the best-selling rock act of the 2000s.
Last night before a crowd of about 15,000 at Blossom, the band stayed true to form during a two-hour set that exposed the lack of musical diversity in the group’s material.
You can see a slideshow of photos from the concert here.
Playing on a two-tiered industrial looking set that glowed and spewed smoke on occasion, the band employed a heavy duty light show. For the opening number, “Feed the Machine,” the group cranked up the amps and rocked as hard as present-day Metallica, albeit without Lars Ulrich’s propulsive drumming behind the track.
The tune featured a rote mid-song guitar solo, and during the band’s performance of it, the set looked like a Universal Studios theme park ride as the video monitor showed non-descript mechanical parts (mostly pipes and cranks), practically simulating a rollercoaster ride. The song ended with the sound of static (intentional, we think).
“Woke Up This Morning” came off as another generic hard rock anthem, and Kroeger, who looked a bit like the Marlboro Man with his cropped hair, neatly trimmed bear and tight black jeans, even let loose an exuberant “alright!” at its conclusion.
The band adhered to that same formula with songs such as “Too Bad” and “Song on Fire.”
The semi-acoustic ballad “Photograph” came off better as it put the band’s songwriting chops on display and allowed Peake and drummer Daniel Adair to add some delicate vocal harmonies that didn’t get washed out by Kroeger’s booming voice and loud guitars. “Lullaby” also benefited from the change in pace as Peake shifted to piano for the tender track, and the band brought singer-guitarist Chris Daughtry, whose band Daughtry opened the show, out to sing “Savin’ Me.” A powerhouse singer, Daughtry really added some dynamics to the tune.
The band wasted an opportunity to further show its range with a cover of the Eagles’ tune “Hotel California.” Kroeger began to sing the track but let the audience chant the lyrics and then cut the song short. Not sure why the guys even bothered to include the track in the 18-song set.
As much as we hate to admit it, the set-closing “How You Remind Me” remains one of the best power ballads of the last 20 years. The chorus, which the audience sang in unison, still strikes a chord and resonates. The lyrics even suggest the band has an introspect side (something you wouldn’t know from songs such as the simple-minded “Something In Your Mouth” and “When We Stand Together,” a tune that came as a shallow, dim-witted political campaign slogan).
Ultimately, the guys in Nickelback presented themselves as a bunch of overgrown frat boys who still like to brag about how much they drank the night before and who still call each “stud” and “buddy.” In fact, Kroeger and Co. often downed shots on stage and joked around with the poor roadie tasked with serving them throughout the set.
When Kroeger pulled two fans on stage to sing “Rock Star” with him, he couldn’t refrain from making a slew of MILF jokes about the woman he brought to the stage, all the while knowing that the woman’s daughter was in attendance. Nice!
Opener Daughtry shared Nickelback’s affinity for formula. In songs such as “Home,” Daughtry and his bandmates paired power chords with simple choruses. For the ballad “Over You,” a standard break-up tune, he effectively enlisted the audience to sing the chorus with him, hoisting his guitar in the air and tossing his guitar pick into the audience at the song’s conclusion. The gesture perfectly set up the cliche-filled Nickelback set to come.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2017.
I was there. And yes, they have a definite “formula” to their stuff…
But as you said accurately… They’ve sold 50 million and they still, after all these years, brought over 15000 into Blossom on a Monday night.
So their “formula” is successful.
Wow. Not only does the author of this article show he knows little-to-nothing about music, he also knows little to nothing about writing. Starting the piece with cliched commentary about how all the songs sound the same (take the link to “How You Remind Me” and “Someday” as an example) just highlight the fact that this writer’s goal was to crucify Nickelback, not write a legit music review about the concert.
The album, Feed the Machine, is geared towards pointing out how people are just fodder for the cannon, so to speak. We do not matter, the powers that be don’t care about us, and we just need to shut up and get back in line. The stage was an amazing representation of the machine that is plastered all over this album’s visuals. If you haven’t bothered to at least look and listen to the album that a tour is for before you go to write a concert review, you might as well not bother going at all. It likely would have been a better article that way.
Now, if you were at this concert hoping to hear all (or at least most) of the new album, and very little old music, you might have a right to be disappointed. The first song of night was from Feed the Machine, but then they quickly jumped to older albums. We didn’t get back to music off the new album until ‘Song on Fire’, which I have to imagine is about Avril Lavigne, though the breakup didn’t seem to be all that rough. Whether you’re a Nickelback aficionado or not, ‘Song on Fire’ does not sound like any of their other songs. In fact, aside from Kroeger’s very distinct voice, it is a fairly unique song compared to their other songs.
This is the point at which the Scene writer starts to be able to string together thoughts and ideas and change up their word choice and writing style, relieving us from the slow, painful death due to boredom that we were inexorably headed for reading this article. I think, perhaps, this writer doesn’t much understand how to use literary tools – mimicking with your writing the the lack of variety you claim your subject has doesn’t really lend credence to your argument. Though, I doubt the author could have come up with any turn of phrase with all that much color. I really want to find another way to say it, but I just keep coming back to the same idea – it’s very obvious that the writer knows nothing about Nickelback, and has never heard Kroeger sing outside of this band (and perhaps this concert!).
I did appreciate the Daughtry spot in the middle of a Nickelback song, but I definitely didn’t think it added ‘dynamics’ to the tune. If anything, Daughtry was slightly out of tune (I actually cringed at one point during Daughtry’s singing with Nickelback), but I also didn’t hold that against Daughtry. Kudos, and good show.
You see, one of the things that amazed me most about this show was the fact that they sounded JUST LIKE they do on the album. No studio tricks, no re-takes, no edits. Just real, live, on the spot music. And if you’re ever tried to sing with such force and depth, the fact that Nickelback did it for a 2 1/2 hour set should amaze you. It explains why Kroeger has to stop and have a drink or two on stage. Again, Kudos, and Kroeger has my respect. That does, though, segue directly into why the did a fully instrumental piece of a Hotel California cover. The Scene writer, that ought to just rename himself ‘chief complainer’ since that’s all he really did, needs to get out and watch a few more concerts before someone lets him post another music review. Every lead – singer, guitarist, whatever – band, playing a set that long, has to have a break in the middle. They are the heart and soul of the stage show, and the energy output that lead has to give is exponential to anyone else on the stage.
There is part of me that just wants to give up at this point, and stop addressing the rest of the article. But then I realized the next 3 paragraphs can be addressed together. If you’re surprised at sexual connotation, innuendo, and ‘frat boy’ behavior, you haven’t been listening to Nickelback. I’ve been commenting for as long as they’ve been around that they write some of the nastiest, dirtiest song – that sound surface innocent without using any foul language – as I’ve heard in recent years. And everyone just eats it up! I can’t get enough. If you spend 1/4 of your article trying to convince people that Nickelback writes bawdy songs, you wasted 1/4 of your article telling us something we’ve known from the beginning.
The few lines in the article that were spent talking about the other bands that were there – or should I say band, since the author didn’t even bother to mention Shaman’s Harvest that closed their set with an amazing performance of Dragonfly – was spent trying to shame Nickelback by alluding that the band that opened for them was better than they were. Which just loops us back to the fact that the author ** knows nothing ** (should we call him Jon Snow?) about what he’s writing about. Not only are they touring together, Nickelback and Daughtry are friends, and Nickelback has even given Daughtry songs … oh wait, they told us that during the concert! Are you sure the author was even there?
The writer of this article, Jeff Niesel, has as just about as much writing talent and skill as he claims Nickelback has musical talent and originality. Someone needs to take his computer way and send him back to school.
Who wrote this article? Your spelling, grammar and writing skills make you the nickelback of journalists!!!