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Music

Critic-proof performance

By RICK GERSHMAN
Published March 15, 2006

TAMPA - Go ahead, Nickelback fans: Prove I'm wrong.

"You're totally wrong. You're completely full of . . ." something we can't share here, but you get the idea provided by Matt Sternberg, 27, of Tampa.

"Nickelback rocks, and if you can't hear that, you don't know music," said Lori Ann Miner, 20, of Lutz.

"As long as people like it, who cares what you or anyone else thinks?" asked Deitrich Abitz, 30, of New Port Richey.

Good question. And it was easily answered Tuesday night at the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa, where thousands of fans couldn't care less how critics view the Canadian rockers. Indeed, many reviewers rip the Canuck quartet. But that happens when you rocket up the charts by chewing up the grunge stylings of great bands such as Nirvana and Alice in Chains and regurgitating them into easily digestible - though unbelievably catchy - radio hits.

I've been a little rough on the boys in recent writings, taking frontman Chad Kroeger to task for everything from his lyric writing to his hairdo. So I figured it was only fair to give Nickelback fans their say while Tuesday's opening acts performed.

(Um, no offense, Chevelle and Trapt: I'm sure you were great. Keep rockin'.)

Tuesday's performance didn't exactly change my mind on Kroeger's locks: Sorry, but outside of AC/DC's Angus Young, that dirty-blonde fried perm is rock's worst.

But despite a thick, sludgy mix, Nickelback seemed to give the crowd everything it wanted, and there's no knocking that.

Credit the band putting some big tunes up front. Nickelback opened with Animals, the second single and most energetic cut off its latest album All the Right Reasons.

The tune finds Kroeger describing sex in a car with a lady young enough to live with her parents. Its most discreet lines - I'm not kidding, the others are much more suggestive - are: It's hard to steer when you're breathing in my ear / But I got both hands on the wheel while you got both hands on my gears.

Just one song later was the hit ballad Photograph, which, for all its lyrical clunkiness, boasts a chorus that takes root in your cerebellum and sets up shop. Hard to say goodbye? It's near impossible when that melody gets in there.

But my personal guilty pleasure remains Figured You Out, a crunchy little rocker that opens with the lines I like your pants around your feet / And I like the dirt that's on your knees.

Sure, it's base, it's crude, it's obvious, it's insanely melodic, it's just perfect. It's what Nickelback does best, and that, my friends, really is critic-proof.

Rick Gershman can be reached at rgershman@sptimes.com or 813 226-3431. His Times blog, The Ill Literate, is at www.sptimes.com/blogs/tampaarts/

[Last modified March 15, 2006, 01:30:11]