Nickelback may not be hip, but it's got angst rock right

By Malcolm X. Abram
Knight Ridder News Service

The Canadian rock band Nickelback made an appearance at the 30th annual American Music Awards in January in Los Angeles. Their tune "How You Remind Me"was the most-played song on the radio, worldwide, for 2002. Associated Press

It's not part of any genre revival; it won't be found in the pages of Mojo or Maximum Rock N Roll; and it sure ain't trying to reinvent the rock 'n' roll wheel.

But cool or not, it did manage to have the most-played song on radio of 2002 in the world — a pretty difficult concept to wrap your brain around.

If you own a radio and actually turned it on last year, you probably heard the little ditty called "How You Remind Me" two or 20 times a day. If you somehow managed to miss that one, maybe you heard another song — "Hero," featuring Nickelback singer Chad Kroeger. It also did pretty well.

"How You Remind Me" is the band's bread and butter, and band members gladly trot it out for fans every night on tour, but the obvious question is, don't they ever get tired of hearing it?

"I switched the station many times," said Nickelback bassist Mike Kroeger, brother of singer Chad.

Yeah?

"Sure! Just like everybody else. I can't listen to the damn thing for two years straight either."

No, this Canadian quartet ain't considered cool, but if you think these musicians sit around wringing their hands and stroking Kroeger's famous beard, worrying about what writer types or urban hipsters have to say about them, you're as delusional as Justin Timberlake is about his beatboxing skills.

"Well, some people think doing heroin is cool, like soiling yourself and puking is great," Kroeger said. "But it all depends on your perception of cool.

"Cool means many things to many people. Some people think we're cool, I guess. They keep turning up at the shows. ... I know that cool factor you're talking about, and I don't know what it is."

So fans won't catch Kroeger at the record store looking for the latest release on Saddle Creek or waiting with bated breath for the new Strokes record?

"No, I've never been much for that," he said, laughing. "Otherwise, I would have been big on Vanilla Ice, and 'Who Let the Dogs Out' would have been blasting out of our van a few years ago."

Whoa, Vanilla Ice?

OK, so Kroeger clearly doesn't know or care about being cool, but he sure knows popular.

The band's new record, "The Long Road," probably doesn't contain the most-played song on the planet for 2003-2004, but it does continue faithfully in the same vein as "Silver Side Up." The band produced the album itself and came up with 40 more minutes of no-frills angst rock that resembles the result of a merger between Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden and "Alive"-era Pearl Jam, with Chad Kroeger seemingly flaying his lungs on every tune.

Though the band's musical antecedents seem pretty obvious, Mike Kroeger said the band members' tastes in music are much more far flung. Guitarist Ryan Peake is a fan of country and pop music, while drummer Ryan Vikedal loves "freaky jazz like John Coltrane and all that crazy stuff and Miles Davis." Kroeger said he is enjoying the complete catalog of Bob Marley given to him by the band's grateful label Roadrunner, while his brother "listens to almost everything. It's all over the board, and he's also a believer in Bob Marley."

Though none of those influences comes through directly in the band's music, Kroeger believes that everything a musician listens to helps to define his own music, and often those elements are undetected. Maybe some of that freaky jazz or Marley skank will make it into Nickelback's fourth record. They can call it "Sketches of Nickelback" or "Grungemen Vibrations."

Or maybe not.

The band's nearly never-ending tour will go on for at least another year. Kroeger said that transient state has become the norm for him (he also takes his wife and two kids out on the road) and warns bands looking for the brass ring to be careful what they wish for.

"Because this thing, music, you work so hard. You push it, you nudge it, you try to make it go, and all of a sudden it starts to go and it's like being handcuffed to a dump truck going down a hill, because you just got to keep up or it's going to kill you."