Nickelback's All The Right Reasons: expanded, with a faint whiff of Nashville

Marmite's very own Nickelback revisit their mega-selling fifth album All The Right Reasons

By
( )
published
Nickelback: All The Right Reasons (15th Anniversary Expanded Edition)
(Image: © Rhino)

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

It’s doubtful that Nickelback would be quite so reviled in certain quarters if they hadn’t sold 50 million albums, of which this 2005 set accounted for around 18 million. 

Sure, their brand of polished-up post-grunge never pushed any envelopes, but for all Chad Kroeger’s leery, creepy lyrics the gutsy riffs and ear-worm hooks of Follow You Home, Animal and The Next Contestant are still hard to resist. Side Of A Bullet is another satisfyingly metallic track, and they rock harder on the 2006 live set included here.

Elsewhere, though, far from corporate grunge-lite, on songs like Rockstar and Photograph they sound uncannily like mainstream bro-country. 

An acoustic version of the latter tune and a couple of others are included here, strengthening the whiff of Nashville. And while their take on Queen’s We Will Rock You is suitably stomping, it’s anything but unpredictable.

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.