Пятница 15 Фев 2008, 15:42
Review #2: Nickelback - All the Right Reasons
Right, Nickelback. Heard pretty much about them, which I guess is inevitable with a big rock band. As before (my other review), I'm going through track by track, then write some kind of conclusion at the end. If you're lazy, skip the trackwise area.
To this point, I haven't heard any Nickelback songs (not that I remember, anyway…).
The album starts off with Follow You Home, which has a little of a grunge-like sound. However, the vocals are definitely not at grunge level (Soundgarden for example). Pretty straight forward, ok rock song. Nothing Special.
Then Fight for All the Wrong Reasons, the second track, which has an interesting title. Here, some of the vocals have a kind of rap-like speed, which sounds pretty good. However, the guitar work sounds almost the same as the previous song.
Next up is Photograph, which according to the band's charts is a pretty popular song. I expected much more of the song because of that, but unfortunately this sounds more like a bad form of pop rock (think When You're Gone, as opposed to The Rasmus for example). Again, average at best.
Animals is a heavier track than previous songs. It again shows clear grunge influences, and sounds pretty catchy. This track is quite worth it. However, it's not as good as Animals ;).
After this heavy track, I was craving more heavy material. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by Savin' Me. This is again a pop rock track, and though better than Photograph, it still makes me turn my speakers down, which is quite a rare phenomenon.
Here, another calm track kicks in: Far Away. This song makes me think I was just wrong on my expectations for this band: it's more like a soft rock band with some hard rock/grunge tracks. This song is relatively good, a calming track, good for a "love scene" in a movie, for example. Though I think love songs are really overrated, this song is pretty good.
The Next Contestant is a pretty grunge-y, good track. Steady riffs, some of the vocal work is actually quite good, as opposed to the rest of the album so far.
Looking for more heavy material, we move on to Side of a Bullet. Wow. Didn't expect to hear a nu metal track on an alt/grunge rock band. Personally, I'm not into typical nu metal (Slipknot and Static X aren't really the main part of nu metal, if you ask me), this song is fairly good. If you love nu metal, this is probably your favourite track.
If Everyone Cared that this title was emo, the emo tag would be big on this band.
Enough jokes, though, this song is a fairly straight rock song, with a little of a classic rock feel to it. Not bad, but not great either. If you're a young kind and want to show off your music to classic-rock-dad, let him hear this song^^.
Onward to an impressive, rhythmically weird song, Someone That You're With. Me, being a pretty weird guy, like the weird sounding riffs in this track, almost making me remember Leyendecker at a few points. This is definitely a pretty good track, however I can imagine it becoming annoying as the rest of the track is more regular rock music.
Then the top track of the band's charts: Rockstar. Unfortunately, this song definitely does not stick to its reputation, title or lyrics: its crap. Throughout the song, it has a "rising edge", every time it makes you think, now the song starts, but the song stays stuck in its boring intro-like part, as opposed to the rock you would expect when you hear part of the song. A disappointing last track on this album.
The version of the CD I have also has three live tracks. Since they aren't on the last.fm album page, I will keep it short: squealing people on the background (seriously, if you like the band so much, STOP SQUEALING and listen/dance/head bang/whatever, cheer when they stop playing!), but a fairly good performance. Vocals are a quite good match of what's on the album.
Conclusion
Overall, the album as quite some average tracks, some peaks and definitely some bad areas too. I don't really like the track order, either. Also, some tracks sound really similar to each other. Leaving out those, the album would much shorter (and probably, much better). In my opinion, the band tries too hard to play two separate sounds, grunge-y rock and softy pop rock. Either combine the genres (Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory is a well known example), play one of them, or play two different albums, but don't combine two different genre's separately in one album.
4/10.