Reviews in Brief: Nickelback, All The Right Reasons

I know, this is the third RiB this week. Treasure it. I go back to work next week, so this department will probably go down to weekly, probably on Sundays.

This is another to come out of that same YouTube clip: the song “Far Away” just grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go, so of course I couldn’t rest until I had it on demand: that means I bought the CD.

Nickelback is another group from my hanging out in bars days -- one of the two or three albums on the juke box at my favorite hangout that I really liked. I think the selection there was Silver Side Up, but don’t quote me on it. All the Right Reasons is Nickelback doing a deliberate stretch, which is probably why it’s their best collection. In terms of overall quality, this one’s at a pretty high level. Chad Kroeger’s vocals are the clincher for me: he’s got this rough growl of a voice that works very well on the hard rockers, as might be expected, and yet is amazingly potent in the ballads: he delivers a kind of urgency -- edging into desperation -- in “Far Away” and “Savin’ Me” that is pretty much irresistible. There is some offside satire here, whether deliberate or not I can’t say: “Rockstar” has got to be parody. It just has to be. And the other tracks? Good, solid rock 'n' roll.

I’ve heard some negatives about the group that mostly seem to stem from the fact that they’ve gotten a lot of airplay -- the nicest was “radio-friendly rock” -- which is neither here nor there: popularity is no indicator of quality (just look at the crap that’s taking up all those linear feet of shelf space in the Fantasy & Science Fiction section of your local Borders, where you are lucky to find a single copy of some of the really good books that are coming out). Meh -- disliking something only because it’s popular doesn’t work for me. And, as far as this album is concerned, it works, and works very, very well. There’s a couple of cuts that aren’t all that great, but on the whole, there’s very few missteps.

It came out in 2005 from Roadrunner Records. Nickelback, of course, has a website, where if you click in the upper right, you'll get sound clips of "Rockstar," "Far Away," and "Photograph" from this CD.

I doubt very much that I'll be reviewing this elsewhere: it's not really on point for GMR or Rambles, and there's no way I'm going to post the 38th consumer review at Epinions.