[rayword45]

Day 54: Dark Horse by Nickelback (Album Choice: ghost223)

These goddamn troll requests...

Apparently this was one of the top albums of the last decade but I don't remember a single singl

So this album is 44 minutes of what I'm guessing will be a bunch of generic pos

The only songs by Nickelback I know are Photograph and How You Remind Me but I also remember how all their songs sound exa

Screw this man, there's no way to give this a good introduction paragraph, and I'm feeling really fatigued so I'm just gonna sit here, eat this tiramisu ice cream and listen. Maybe do some studying along the way.

Well, this first track is way worse than I expected, but I actually tried to go in with a half-decent outlook so I don't deserve to be disappointed. It's the same heinous vocals I expected but vocals are not that important to me. The riffage here is dumb (and riffage is a dumb word in and out of itself), the lyrics are dumb, and the song is a mix of dumb brutish metal and dumb redneck country. This just screams intelligence, man.

Seriously, while I do more often than I'd like to admit fall into pretension, I don't feel elitist in the least when I say that this music is meant to appeal to morons. Nickelback doesn't have only one song, that's wrong. They have two songs.

The first one is some horrible amalgamation of the worst parts of Pantera, Marilyn Manson and Stone Temple Pilots, topped with Chad Kroeger's idiosyncratic(ally horrible) vocals singing some gross poem he probably penned in 10 minutes about sex.

The other one is a syrupy power ballad, with instrumentation straight from the school of "How to be third-rate Journey", lyrics written with the songwriter that probably isn't Chad trying to suddenly wrangle some respect out of his heart for his woman, and the singer that is most definitely Chad trying to strain his one-octave voice further.

Let me spend an extra paragraph just saying how EFFING HORRIBLE these lyrics are. The ballads are a bit less offensive, coming off as someone's first attempt at a love letter, horribly awkward and slightly cringeworthy but not necessarily abhorrent. The other song... Jesus Christ. The bad sex metaphors are stupid enough one at a time, piling them up into a song is just... Holy crap. Go listen to S.E.X and read the lyrics and try to not feel physically ill. It might have been the ice cream, but I damn near vomited upon reading the third and fourth verses.

I sometimes agree with people when they say Nickelback is overhated, dunno if I will after this album. My previous opinion was that they made slightly-sickening subpar radio-bred cock rock, not that much worse than other pop garbage. However that opinion was based off of two songs, and now that I've listened to a full album, I stand by any claim that these guys are truly offensive to the ears. Unlike that Justin Bieber album, there's no hilarious irony here (because Chad's media life has about zero funny bits yet has one-third the gross factor), and there's no real one redeeming song. On the other hand, only one song here caused me any physical ailment. And I'll give credit to This Afternoon for breaking the two song formula and instead just sounding like the dumbest country-pop song I have ever heard. THE DUMBEST, but at the same time, slightly hilarious in how bad it is, and in the context of bad country Kroeger's voice is slightly less offensive.

I didn't get to study.

Best Track: This Afternoon for the reasons mentioned a damn sentence ago.
Rating: 1/10