Thursday, April 20, 2006

Jon Tells You What To Think, Part 6

(see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)

After a year and a half of anticipation, the number one album of all time is:

Nickelback – All The Right Reasons

For a long time I wrote Nickelback off as just another stupid gutless rock band that took the already artistically vacant genre of nu-metal and stripped it of what little integrity, passion and edginess it may have had, producing offensively bland rock music for people who want to 'rock out', but are scared off by the trace elements of heaviness found in the likes of Linkin Park or Disturbed.

How wrong I was! At first I found the repetitive and unimaginative theme of 'some chick who dumped me' behind the lyrics of virtually every song somewhat annoying, but that was before I heard 'Someday', which deals with the stunningly original and daring subject of 'nostalgia', and how Chad Kroeger misses some shit he had as a kid. Brilliance!

Like the lyrics, the songs themselves at first seem boring and repetitive, surely only a bunch of brainless idiots would release two songs from the same album as singles with the same chord progression. But as their wikipedia article quite rightly points out, it's only the same song if you cut out the bridges and change the tempo! But the fact that their songs contain so little variety or development means that the album is that much more cohesive, after all, who wants to deal with some new mood, key or riff every four minutes?

I picked All The Right Reasons as the greatest album of all time because it's their most recent release, but really I could have picked any of their albums, as they're all pretty much the same. And that's the secret of their talent, what other band has the skill to take the most monotonous sounding music ever made and play it exactly the same way for five albums?

4 comments:

hg said...

I'd definitely smite the lead singer of Nickelback, who looks like a greased Canadian Jesus and sings heartfelt, gravelly-voiced odes to tough, manly love affairs. I must admit that his straining voice makes it difficult to avoid imagining that he does his best studio vocal work while on the toilet working out a particularly complicated intestinal blockage.

Anonymous said...

Aren't you about 19 days too late on this post?

Squirk said...

You had me for a while.

Jon said...

If I posted this on April Fools Day even Rob wouldn't fall for it...