Nickelback
Dark Horse

Review By Emily Zemler

Nickelback’s sixth album starts like this: “Got to meet the honey with the million dollar body/They say it’s over-budget/But you’d pay her just to touch it.” The song? It’s called “Something In Your Mouth.” It’s about a stripper with a “pretty pink thong,” and the chorus goes “You look so much cuter with something in your mouth.” It’s almost like Nickelback knew two things to be true: 1) Fans, the millions and millions that they somehow have, will love anything the Canadian rock band does, and 2) Every critic is going to hate this record and probably call it misogynistic, so they might as well take it as far over the line as possible.
That first song is thankfully as bad as it gets (lyrically, not musically) and the record alternates between the Motley Crue-inspired, Guitar Hero-aspiring cock rock of tracks like “Burn It To the Ground” and “Shakin’ Hands” and ballads like “I’ll Come For You” and “Never Gonna Be Alone,” on which singer Chad Kroeger practices sounding like he really wants something. Kroeger gets especially deep on the inspirational “If Today Was Your Last Day” (he sings “It’s never too late/To shoot for the stars/Regardless of who you are”) and on “Just To Get High,” a track presumably about a drug-addicted friend who passed away. It could have been poignant, but Kroeger ruins any chance of that when he yelps, “But I can still remember what his face looked like/When I found him in an alley in the middle of the night.”

Kroeger seems torn between singing about sex, offering lines like “Sex is always the answer/It’s never a question/’Cause the answer is yes” on “S.E.X.” over a cascade of generic arena rock riffs, and trying to be deep on sappy ballads about love. But when he moans about not wanting to be alone, you kinda want to remind him that most women don’t want to be with a man like him.