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1. Never Again: A song about domestic violence. This is the most pissed off I've ever heard these guys. 9/10

2. How You Remind Me: The single that launched them to the top of the charts. Need I say more? 10/10

3. Woke up this morning: Love the guitar solo here. Fairly good rock song. 9/10

4. Too Bad: The next single. A bit angrier than How You Remind Me, but still as catchy. 10/10

5. Just For: Really Hard, and doesn't that opening guitar sound kinda like "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? 8/10

6. Hollywood: Nothing really stands out here, I usually skip this. 6/10.

7. Money Bought: Some great lines in this one. 8/10

8. Where Do I Hide: My personal fave. Harder than the singles, but Nickelback sounds better like this. 10/10

9. Hangnail: My second fave on the CD, for all the same reasons as the first. 10/10

10. Good Times Gone: A switch to slow rock , but still as good as the rest of the songs. This features Ian Thornley, the lead singer of Big Wreck, on guitar. 9/10

In general, if you buy this CD for "How You Remind Me", you may be in for a bit of a surprise. However, if you can stand harder music, this is a good album.


The best Nickelback album to date   October 7, 2004
 28 out of 38 found this review helpful

This is the best of the best of Nickelback with great songs created with the essence of messages behind each song. Almost each song has an internal message and a heart felt plea of modern ailments that is affecting our societies today such as drug and alcohol abuse, domestic voilence, cheating etc. All these songs cover these issues and more. Each song is sung with emotion and feeling by Chad and followed up by the rest of the band.

This is Nickelback at their superb best. Other great songs to listen too are Too Bad (a father and son relationship that goes sour), Money Brought (where fame leads to corruption) and Hangnail (a breakup between a couple - from a male's perspective)


This is too much   April 25, 2002
 25 out of 48 found this review helpful

... Nickelback's debut "The State" was half decent, the only reason I bought into that was because sometimes they reminded me of Alice in Chains but more poppy. The day I heard "How You Remind Me" I almost crashed my car laughing, now Nickelback sounds like Creed trying to imitate Soundgarden. I finally managed to listen to this album, and nearly every song is a rip off of some sort or another of Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam, except Nickelback has lost the edge they had on "The State" and replaced it with more catchy hooks and pop melodies than one can swallow. With the recent wave of all the new "delicate, sensitive" hard rock like Nickelback, Creed, Staind, and Puddle of Mudd, hard rock/heavy metal as we know it is quickly going down .... I for one have had enough of this ..., ...


The epitome of all that is soulless and wrong   February 10, 2005
 24 out of 40 found this review helpful

Much as I try to avoid injecting personal anecdotes into my reviews, I feel one is necessary in this case. Anyway, a couple days ago, during one of my interminable drives home from work, I was listening to the Afghan Whigs' album Black Love and trying to figure out exactly why I liked it so much. After all, while it was a well-written and well-played rock album, for the most part the songs on it weren't all that original or complex. In general, it was the type of album I usually tire of after one or two listens, but that wasn't happening this time. Eventually, I realized just what it was that made me like the Whigs so much: emotion. Almost every note of the album was delivered with an unmistakable fire and passion, and that energy was infectious. The songs on Black Love were felt as much as they were played.

By now you might be wondering, what exactly does the foregoing story have to do with Nickelback, the band I'm supposed to be discussing? Well, quite a bit, actually. In sharp contrast to the Afghan Whigs, Nickelback represent everything that's wrong about the state of mainstream rock today: while they are technically competent, Nickelback's music is completely devoid of anything that bears even a passing resemblance to soul. With the possible exception of Puddle of Mudd, I've never heard a band that was more blatantly going through the motions than these guys. How You Remind Me, this album's best-known number and probably the most overplayed song ever performed by somewhat not named Celine Dion, is a perfect example of the problem. This song doesn't song like it was written to make an emotional statement, or reflect any artistic ambitions on the part of the band; it sounds like it was written to be a hit. Of course, How You Remind Me was in fact a huge hit, but writing a hit song isn't the same thing as writing a good song.

The rest of Silver Side Up suffers from the same problem. Nickelback obviously refuse to jeopardize their record sales by doing anything foolish, like taking a risk or doing something original. Too Bad is basically the same song as How You Remind Me, except frontman Chad (Jesus) Kroeger is apparently supposed to be mad at his father instead of at his ex. Sorry guys, but that doesn't exactly count as diversity. Never Again sounds like it was intended to be the "heavy, angry" song that established the band's hard-rock credibility, but it just comes off sounding flat, bland, and uninspired. Pearl Jam did stuff like this better ten years ago, and even they were somewhat derivative, but at least they put some feeling into what they did. It's rumored that there are some other tracks on Silver Side Up as well, although one could be forgiven for thinking Nickelback just recorded one more song and put it on the album seven times in order to pad it out. If Chad Kroeger isn't the single most monotone vocalist in rock history, he's certainly pretty close.

Even worse, in 2003 these guys had the gall to make the first single from their new album Someday, which is almost a note-for-note ripoff of How You Remind Me. Apparently stealing from Pearl Jam and Bush wasn't enough for these guys, so they had to stoop to swiping their own biggest hit. Not that it matters to the semi-catatonic drones who listen to this drivel in the first place. If your brain still functions, you'd be better off listening to, well, anyone other than Nickelback.