It’s only been released about a month ago, and already it has become one of my favourite albums. Well, Nickelback’s my favourite band, so that explains it. Although I was a bit disappointed by All The Right Reasons after the ingenious The Long Road, it’s still a great album. And my up-to-now favourite Nickelback song Figured You Out got a strong competitor in the form of Far Away, which I do not only love for the lyrics, but also for the simple yet fantastic melody, strong beats but a surprisingly very calm tune.
The riff-heavy Fight For All The Wrong Reasons, which seems to have been decisive concerning the album’s title, is amazing, as well as the opener, which nevertheless is not as good as the opener of their last album Flat On The Floor. If you like Photograph (which has absolutely great lyrics written by Chad Kroeger) or other songs you heard on the radio by Nickelback, you might not really like the album, as such songs are not typical for Nickelback, which can be clearly heard in Side Of A Bullet for example, which is hard rock at its highest. It is one of their best songs ever, and is dedicated to Darell Abott (Pantera’s guitarist), as it talks about his murder. It features one of Abott’s last solos, which is absolutely ingenious.
Another song which I really like on this album is Rock Star, a critic of the, well you guess it, rock stars:
‘Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We’ll all stay skinny ’cause we just won’t eat
And we’ll hang out in the coolest bars
In the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger’s gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny with her bleach blond hair
And we’ll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary and today’s who’s who
They’ll get you anything with that evil smile
Everybody’s got a drug dealer on speed dial
Although If Everyone Cared seems a bit weak to me, perhaps because it’s a ballad which I don’t really like, all in all, I’m happy I bought this album, it’s a great piece of work, and I can only recommend it to the (hard) rock and of course the Nickelback fans of you out there.
I haven’t found it in any cd shop yet, but of course it’s available on the iTunes Music Store (which is also great if you simply want to listen to song extracts) and on Amazon.
This song Rock Star… The Lyrics somehow remind me of a song by Cypress Hill called Rap/Rock Superstar (exists in 2 versions, as you guess, one about the Rap and one about the Rock Superstars)
I think this coincidence is somehow strange… dontcha think?
I certainly don’t claim that Nickelback are the first or the only ones to criticize the rich music stars, but now that I have read the lyrics of this Cypress Hill song, I don’t really see an obvious link, the only thing that I found in both songs is the many cars that rock stars drive.
The theme of both songs might be the same, but the lyrics certainly are not.