Review Summary: Hating you just ain't as fun as it used to be.
It must be a nice feeling to have cultivated the sort of niche audience that Chad Kroeger and his gang of rapscallions and scallywags affectionately known as Nickelback have done. To not have to produce anything of substance because they've compiled a group of people who will lap up their new material like a dehydrated dog does water, well, it's certainly enviable for those of us who view music as a money-making industry first and foremost. To true lovers of artistry, of course, it's an unfortunate thing to witness, but do you really think Kroeger gives a sh*t? Nah, he sold out to the trailer park-residing crowd a good decade and change ago, when "How You Remind Me" blew up and the dollar signs dancing in Chad's head started spouting out poetry such as "what the hell is on Joey's head" and "the girls come easy and the drugs come cheap". And yet even the Nickelback of, say, 2008 was at least...interesting, or at least if blatant misogyny equates being interesting. Nowadays the band has diluted itself for commercial accessibility's sake, a good step for those of us who detest misogynistic lyricism, but arguably a step backwards in terms of artistry.
Ah, but Chad Kroeger, wily opportunist that he is, has seized a chance to capitalize upon the unrest following the 2016 U.S. presidential election by penning an album that, on first glance, seems to deal with revolution and movements in general (we even have two tracks ending with "Act III" and "Act I"; that sounds mildly progressive; why, he's a bona fide Roger Waters!). And based off of the title track and lead single, it's clear that after 2014's
No Fixed Address dabbled briefly in pop music to mixed reviews,
Feed the Machine is going to return Nickelback to a hard rock-laced pseudo-metal sound, giving it the necessary edge to get Kroeger's political/social statements across loud and clear. There's only one problem with this assertion: Kroeger is blatantly pulling the wool over everyone's eyes and you are part of the sheeple if you can't recognize this. This is not a political album in the slightest, save for the title track that is basically a harder-edged retread of Nickelback's previous two harder-edged revolution-themed singles "This Means War" and "Edge of a Revolution", and the track "Silent Majority" which is the band's cut-and-paste "let's all come together and make a change" track. Their sentiments are as sincere as every Donald Trump apology ever, but hey, if it's simple enough for their fanbase, it's good enough for Kroeger and Co.
If
Feed the Machine stands out in Nickelback's catalog for any reason, it will be because it's the band's blandest album to date. You name a riff, you name a lyrical theme, you name a song structure: it's been repeated in many a Nickelback album before this, likely multiple times at that. The songs themselves are relatively inoffensive, though Kroeger might have produced his new most embarrassing lyric of all-time with this gem:
"we just got high and hopin' no one can tell, but with the icky of the sticky it don't matter where the wind blows". But this album doesn't have many of these moments, and as I finished it I really did have to wonder: has it gotten to the point where Nickelback can't even be an awful, insulting-to-the-ears band anymore, but merely a poor, unforgivably boring one? I left my listening experience with no feelings of positivity and only the slightest lean towards negativity, a sensation I never felt I'd experience listening to a Nickelback album. Artistic purgatory is a status nobody wants to ever approach in their lifetime, and yet I feel Chad Kroeger and his cohorts have officially entered that with this record. A sizable portion of the Nickelback hater in me died listening to this album, so if you want to keep your anti-Nickelback rage coursing through your veins for the foreseeable future, avoid
Feed the Machine like the plague. It might just do the indefensible and imbue you with feelings of rather disappointed neutrality instead.
