You know, I never really think I fully got the level of hatred this band received until I heard this album in full. Granted, I was already aware that between their sludgy, viscerally ugly musical sound, their songwriting that vacillates between insufferable whining angst and meatheaded party songs, their bizarre aptitude for writing some of the worst lyrics in all of popular music, and the fact that their lead singer sounds like he has a bad case of strep-throat, that they were musicians of an exceptionally poor quality. But I don’t think I ever understood why they were routinely touted as the Worst Band of All Time until I experienced the sheer concentrated horror that is this album. In reality, they are not the worst band of all time (that prize probably goes to Grindcore band Anal Cunt…at least Nickelback have never, to the best of my knowledge, written a song gloating about a child’s death), but the fact that they achieved the level of mainstream success that they did is still absolutely astounding in all the wrong ways.
You see, what is most fascinating (and horrifying) about this album is that it is in the surprisingly tiny category of albums that have sold over ten million copies (generally referred to as the Diamond certification, although due to the arbitrary regulations of the industry, only about two-thirds of those albums are officially certified as thus). There are other bad albums that have made the ‘Diamond’ category (Creed’s Human Clay and Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water come to mind, as does Eminem’s Encore), but nothing that even approaches this album in terms of sheer rock-bottom awfulness.
You see, this is not only Nickelback’s most successful album, but also their worst one. Even Nickelback’s other Diamond-selling album, their mainstream breakthrough Silver Side Up, might as well be a masterpiece compared to this atrocity. The same is true of their follow-up to that album, The Long Road…at that point they were in their larval stage of awfulness, not much more than just another whiny Post-Grunge sludge-rock band (believe me, there was no shortage of them at the time). Their follow-up to this album, Dark Horse, was arguably just as bad if not worse in terms of songwriting, but it also had legendary producer Mutt Lange doing his damnedest to make their music into something listenable. And their albums from the 2010s are frankly little more than Bro-Country without the twang, and they don’t even have the distinction of being the worst Bro-Country-esque albums released in that decade.
This album, on the other hand, almost defies description. For starters, it contains what are probably the two worst hit songs of the entire 2000s decade (a dubious prize that I probably don’t have to tell you posed some astronomical competition),”Photograph” and “If Everyone Cared”. The biggest problem with “Photograph” is its complete lack of a tune…Nickelback’s earlier songs may have been sludgy and unpleasant, but at least they had discernible melodies. Chad Kroeger’s voice also sounds about the worst it has ever sounded here, making the horrible music even more unlistenable. On top of that, the lyrics are, to be frank, incredibly stupid, a bunch of directionless minutiae that the singer apparently remembers fondly but never manages to make remotely interesting to the audience.
“If Everyone Cared” might be even worse. This song was the result of Nickelback’s attempt to write a revolutionary anthem of change without actually saying anything controversial, resulting in what may be the most nakedly insincere collection of empty platitudes in all of Rock. A four-minute song that says absolutely nothing is kind of a perverse achievement to begin with, but to try to pass off such a song as profound and inspirational is almost unthinkable. This is basically Nickelback’s version of “Imagine”, a comparison that says more about the band’s awfulness than even its most violent detractors could possibly come up with. “Photograph” is arguably more incompetent, but this song shows such an unutterable contempt for their own audience that it is actually offensive.
And the true horror of the situation is that neither of these are even close to being the worst songs on this album: the album’s first two tracks, the gratuitously unpleasant stalker song “Follow You Home” and the absolutely disgusting “Fight For All the Wrong Reasons” are far worse than any of the seven radio hits this album produced. (Yes, this album had seven singles, and all of them were apparently played heavily on Rock stations at the time. I just have to be thankful that I only listened to showtunes back when this band was at its peak).
Then, of course, there’s the soppy, overwrought ballad “Savin’ Me”. Now, Nickelback have an annoying habit of occasionally putting brief fragments of oddly arresting melody into songs that are, in every other respect, complete dumpster fires. On “Someday”, the single from their album prior to this one, it was in the pre-chorus (“Nothing’s wrong, just as long as you know that someday I will”). On “Savin’ Me”, it’s the second half of the chorus itself, about three seconds of striking melody which even Chad Kroeger’s singing can’t completely obscure. I suppose we should greet these occasional infinitesimal flashes of actual melody as a relief, but seeing them wasted on such terrible songs is so annoying that it’s almost worse than not having them there at all.
The rest of the album is filled out by “Animals” (probably the worst song ever written about statutory rape, and that‘s a prize no-one should want to win), “Far Away” (a generic ballad that would merely be boring if not for Kroeger’s intolerable vocals), and the dull, half-written album-filler tracks “Next Contestant” and “Someone That You’re With”. The one song on this album that people are most inclined to defend is “Side of a Bullet”, which was written about the murder of Dimebag Darrell, a member of the legendary Metal band Pantera. I’m sure the band had worthy intentions for writing it, but just because the subject is deep doesn’t mean the song is. It’s a cartoonish, absurdly melodramatic near-parody highly reminiscent of their attempt to write about domestic abuse a few albums back with “Never Again”, and it looks particularly bad given that the band Machine Head would release an infinitely better song about the same subject with “Aesthetics of Hate”.
And now we come to the album’s closing track and probably its biggest hit, “Rockstar”. To be honest, I will admit to having a tiny bit of a soft spot for this particular song. Maybe it’s only in comparison to the band’s other work that it starts to look good, but for what it’s worth, this is still about the best song Nickelback ever recorded: if you go to well enough times (and God help us, they did), you’re eventually going to come up with something at least vaguely redeemable if only by sheer luck. I’d even go so far as to say that the level of hatred this song receives (Wikipedia includes it prominently on its sourced list of “Songs or music considered the worst”) probably boils down to its being the most recognizable hit by a widely reviled band more than the quality of the song itself. Granted, the self-consciously retro-rock tune is only marginally better than their usual stuff, and we still have to deal with Chad Kroeger’s unpleasant rasp of a voice, but the lyrics are surprisingly sharp and have a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and eye for detail that makes them much more interesting than your typical catalogue of luxury cliches. And while closing out ten tracks of self-flagellating angst with a party song does do a lot to neutralize any perceived sincerity those songs might have had, it stills works better here than the same strategy worked on their last album with “See You At the Show”.
Still, even with one almost-okay track at the very end of the album, this is without question the absolute worst album to ever “Go Diamond”. I can’t imagine why any sane person would buy this, but I guess it’s not a surprise in at least one sense: Nickelback are definitely an album band. Indeed, their singles are virtually indistinguishable from their album tracks. I would even go so far as to say that they maintain a more consistent level of quality across the board than almost any other band I know, and even if that level happens to be “rock-bottom terrible”, I suppose I can see why anyone weird enough to like this garbage would invest in a full album of it. I just wish I could pretend there weren’t over ten million of those people in the world.