Listening to this album, I constantly asked myself how anyone could possibly enjoy it. It seemed so shallow, predictable, and lifeless compared to anything else in my CD collection. But after some rumination, I've arrived at an explanation. Allow me, at the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious, to present the allegory of Plato's Cave. Suppose a group of people are raised from birth inside a darkened cave, chained to chairs facing a wall. Now, on this wall shadows of forms are projected. Now, given that these people are raised from birth inside the cave, these shadows and forms are all they know of the world; in their minds, they ARE the world. But suppose one of them is dragged to the surface, and sees for the first time what the world is really like, full of color and life. And if they went back down into the cave, they'd never be able to look at the pictures on the wall as anything but mere shadows.
So it is with music. For most people, their only experience with music comes in the form of sanitized, corporate radio-rock, typified by Nickelback. But once you listened to music beyond the mainstream; been "dragged out of the cave" so to speak, you never really look at the mainstream with such fondness as you did before.
What's sad about "All The Right Reasons" is that Nickelback, either through a conscious decision on their part or by pressure from their label, refused to expand, develop, or otherwise alter their sound at all. Rest assured, if you liked "Silver Side Up" or "The Long Road" you'll love "All The Right Reasons." But if you found those albums to be soulless, manufactured and repetitive, you'll be able to say the exact same thing about this album, too. Nickelback exemplify 100% safe, watered down, exceedingly simplistic and generic Hard Rock. This is the kind of music you can imagine Soccer Moms "rocking out" to. Listening through ATRR painfully reminded me why I had left mainstream "verse-chorus-verse" rock behind a long time ago.
"All the Right Reasons" hits all the right cliches for generic, formulaic rock. We've got the more aggressive track "Animals" so that the band can establish some kind of hard rock credibility. We've got the made-for-a-hit-single "Photograph," the supposedly angry swagger of "Next Contestant" and syrupy, cheesy dreck like "If Everybody Cared" or "Far Away." By far the worst track has to be "Rockstar," where Chad brags about how good it will be when he's a big rock star, which is a pitiful attempt at being sarcastic and ironic, but only comes across as being unintentionally honest, given that the band clearly have their sights set on money-making and nothing else.
"All the Right Reasons" is yet another bland offering from the masters of mass-produced, corporate rock. Nothing dangerous, nothing new. The sound of Nickelback is not of a band wishing to express themselves artistically; it's the sound of a band who have found a very profitable trend and are going to milk it as long as they can. Spend your money elsewhere.
Summoning
