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TOPIC: They know how to rock just hard enough

twain2country

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Date: Wed Mar 4 5:58 PM, 2009

They know how to rock just hard enough

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J.D. CONSIDINE March 4, 2009 Nickelback At the Air Canada Centre in Toronto on Monday No matter how much Canadian hipsters may have revelled in the rave reviews the American music press granted Feist, Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, it has always seemed to rankle that the most popular Canadian band in the United States is Nickelback. It isn't merely that front man Chad Kroeger, with his blond pageboy and lounge-lizard goatee, is anything but an avatar of cool; the Nickelback sound, with its crunchy guitars, oversized choruses and hard-rock swagger, is so disappointingly middle-of-the-road when compared to the idiosyncratic arrangements and conceptual quirks of our artier exports. On the other hand, it would be hard to imagine a more typically Canadian crowd than the one that filled Toronto's Air Canada Centre on Monday, for the first Canadian date of the band's Dark Horse tour. Contrary to what the music videos might suggest, the typical Nickelback fan isn't young, male, beer-fuelled and testosterone-crazed. Instead, these rock animals are more often female than male and frequently travel in family units, with boomer parents as avid as their spawn. Had the band simply snatched people from a random assortment of shopping malls and Tim Hortons, it's doubtful the crowd would have looked much different. What makes the crowd's utter normality seem a bit odd is the way it both does and doesn't reflect the Nickelback ethos. No one seemed to mind, for example, the sexist innuendo of the show-opening Something in Your Mouth, which boasted a three-storey-high video of bikini-clad dancing girls and a chorus that coyly alludes to oral sex, or the ease with which the band changed the final chorus of Rockstar to "I wanna be a porn star." On the other hand, despite Kroeger's exhortations to party like it was Saturday night and unleash "the spirit of rock 'n' roll," the Toronto crowd remained as polite as it was enthusiastic. Everyone had fun, sure, but they probably would have had as good a time at the musical We Will Rock You. That's not a diss, by the way. Fact is, Nickelback knows how to put on a show and can make the razzle-dazzle of the staging seem like just another part of the package, like the montage of snapshots that appeared on the video screen during Photograph. Sure, they used enough fireworks to make it seem like Victoria Day came early, but the pyrotechnic display never seemed like overkill - even when the stage was belching enough flame to roast wieners. Basically, Nickelback understands where to draw the line between oversized and excessive, and that's as true of the music as it is the visuals. Kroeger and company certainly have a command of the hard-rock vocabulary, but they never let that edge crowd out the music's pop content. It's worth nothing that the sing-along chorus to Gotta Be Somebody is powered by the same stomping beat that took Shania Twain up the charts, while the exuberance of the party-hearty Burn It to the Ground owes more than a little to the hook-heavy sound of Def Leppard. By contrast, the evening's least convincing moment was the band's leaden cover of Filter's Hey Man, Nice Shot, which captured neither the aggression nor the menace of the original. Indeed, the only disturbing note in the whole evening was Kroeger's ongoing patter about boozing - or, as the song This Afternoon put it, "We drink up, we fall down/ And then we do it all again." For a guy whose driver's licence is suspended thanks to a DUI arrest in B.C. in 2006, all that talk about cold beers and vodka and, "Where are we going for drinks afterward?" hardly spoke to lessons learned. Then again, it was a rock show, not a morality seminar, and if there's one thing Nickelback and its fans understand, it's that sometimes a show is just a show. Nickelback performs at the Rexall Centre in Edmonton April 1, the Pengrowth Saddledome in Calgary April 2, the Credit Union Centre in Saskatoon April 4 and the MTS Centre in Winnipeg April 5. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090304.ANICKELBACK04/TPStory/TPEntertainment/Music/

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twainee

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Posts: 281

Date: Thu Mar 5 7:58 AM, 2009

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Unfortunately I'm still too stupid to cut and paste At this site , however, there is a very interesting article about how Mutt produces his albums. http://uninflectedimages.blogspot.com/2009/02/sound-of-hysteria.html -- Edited by Tommy at 12:50, 2009-03-05 __________________ linda

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