Draven Reviews: Nickelback's Feed the Machine

Waterboarding. Branding. Whipping. Drawing and quartering. What do all of these things have in common? That’s right, none of them are quite as painful as enduring a Nickelback album from front to back. Since the turn of the century, these auditory sadists have been terrorizing the airwaves, releasing album after album of generic, ear-grating radio rock that your weird uncle who owns ten identical pairs of jean shorts just loves. And this year, these Canadian musical menaces have struck again, releasing their ninth studio album, Feed the Machine, this past June.

Given that this review is for a school paper, and I know it’ll be hard enough to get any of my peers to seek out this review to begin with, I won’t burden you with much to read. So let’s get the positives out of the way first: the guitar solo on “For the River” is pretty good. Other than that, this album is a dumpster fire. It’s only about forty minutes in length, but boy does it feel like a whole lot longer. All of these tracks are generic messes, with nothing but repetitive power chord-based guitar riffs and grating crooning populating the album’s entire runtime. My listening experience with Feed the Machine was a painful one, but I don’t think I’ve really done this record justice yet. For you to truly understand… to truly comprehend what we’re dealing with here, here is an excerpt of the lyrics from the album’s fourth track, “Must Be Nice”: