Nickelback - Dark Horse

The last time I went through a Nickelback album, I wondered if this was what the legacy that Messrs Cobain and Vedder’s grunge scene was to leave behind. In a time when lyrical content was becoming more and more relevant to the music played and listened to, Nickelback seem to be, to borrow from T.A.T.U., 200 miles per hour in the wrong lane, with their insipid, wildly unimaginative and plainly literal lyrics. So, when I got around the new album, it was with much trepidation and dread of what was to come, that I took the cover off.

And I was mildly surprised!!

With Mutt Lange, producer on Shania Twain and Def Leppard, Chad Kroeger’s genteel rockers seem to have found that little bit of integrity left in them that spawned the heavier mainstream pop/rock hits such as ‘Rockstar’ and ‘How You Remind Me’, and have come up with an album more in sync with ‘Silver Side Up’, and the likes.

So the album is replete with promises of oral sex, and imagery of ‘pretty pink thongs’ and slightly perverse misogyny (“She ain’t any Cinderella when she is gettin’ undressed /’Cause she rocks it like the naughty Wicked Witch of the West”). Then there’s ‘Shaking Hands’, about a woman who sleeps her way to the top of the corporate tree. (“six figures workin’ three days a week” and ”didn’t make it this far by just shakin’ hands”). The addition of Mutt Lange has taken the sound a little further, adding elements of arena-rock to the sound, especially the drum sound and to the vocals. The guitar riffs sit cosily somewhere between jangly old school rock and bone crunching Zakk Wylde riffage.

The reason for not mentioning any of the other songs here is that they’re really not worth it, apart from maybe ‘S.E.X.’, which is more of the same old shit. There are a few nice old country tunes but I don’t really think they have any space left to critique, because ideally, that’s the part of the album that would have been worth a lot more than without the manufactured sentiment.

With Kroeger’s horndog lyrics paving the way for the rest of the band to play their slick, snappier-than-necessary power ballads, Nickelback are sure to garner the platinum status, even in these troubled times. But the same problem that plagued ‘All The Right Reasons’ sits firmly on the shoulders of ‘Dark Horse’ too. You can’t really relate to this music. It’s not a Cobain singing about his drug induced constipation, or Vedder going off about Jeremy’s parents. It’s crass, about crass rock stars that care for nothing but everything wet and pink, and out there. The implied misogyny takes the music only so far, and after the album plays out, we’re left with one, very, very important question – is there someone who actually likes Nickelback?