Repetition plagues Nickelback show

Nickelback filled the Bryce Jordan Center last night, both with raucous fans and with tedious, unadventurous music.

Excuse me. After watching the concert last night, I can't help but feel a little bit repetitive. The show featured Three Days Grace and Breaking Benjamin -- two bands who sound like Nickelback -- and, of course, Nickelback itself, which sounds like an amalgamation of everything else.

Three Days Grace opened the show, and as Adam Gontier screamed, "You were wrong if you think that I'll be just like you" with his fist in the air, he promptly put his foot in his mouth as his declaration of anti-conformity was negated by the fact that his entire band (as well as a large portion of the crowd) was dressed entirely in black.

Gontier also went the entire set without uttering more than a sentence or two that didn't contain some sort of unprintable expletive.

Next on the stage were local boys (Harrisburg is closer than Ontario or Alberta) Breaking Benjamin. I'm by no means a fashionista,

but I have to point out that they, too, aside from a pair of camouflage pants and a pair of jeans, were also clad nearly entirely in black. The bands' monochromatic apparel, though, definitely went well with their greyish, monotonous post-grunge alt-metal.

Nickelback is apparently one of those bands that, in a vain attempt to build up crowd tension, makes their fans wait an exorbitant amount of time before they take the stage. Forty full minutes surpassed between the ending of Breaking Benjamin's set and the initial obnoxious cannon blast that signified Nickelback's arrival on stage.

It's entirely possible, though, that Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger just needed some extra time to count his money -- the merchandise booths at the stadium were selling T-shirts for $35 and hoodies as expensive as $70.

Nickelback made their entrance to some loud booms and bright fireworks, pyrotechnics that would continue sporadically for the duration of the show. Some of the flames were welcome, however, as the sudden changes in temperature provided more dynamism than any of the bands could for the entire night.

At one point in the show, Kroeger brought onto the stage various members of his crew and the other bands to shoot T-shirts out of cannons to the crowd. Does he work at Hooters now?

He also brought out a cardboard cutout of Joe Paterno. Before and after this display, he assured the crowd that, if it were up to him, the legal drinking age in this country would be 18 years old, reasoning that if you're old enough to die for your country, you're old enough to "drink the beer."

Kroeger is not a political activist and, in reality, he probably doesn't care about the drinking age in this country (one that's also a foreign country, to him). It was a cheap, populist (albeit very effective) move aimed to elicit a few cheers from the crowd. After watching this, I'm certain that, if Kroeger had run for president of his high school, he would have been the kid to promise soda in the drinking fountain.

This type of thing may have even been passable if the band had played better music. Instead, they turned out one of the most contrived, derivative performances I've ever seen, replete with cheesy images on the giant screen behind them. There were several instances during the show during which I would have sworn that they were playing a song they had already played.

Before playing "Side of a Bullet," a song dedicated to the late Pantera drummer Dimebag Darrell, Kroeger told the crowd that a guitar solo in the song was lifted directly from Pantera outtakes, as an homage to their friend. Such an admission begs the question, though: How many metalheads had to die for Nickelback to put together their entire derivative catalogue? We know the answer for one song, but if I could get an explanation for the rest of their oeuvre, I could sleep a whole lot easier.

Why does Nickelback have two guitarists? At any given time during their set, they were both playing the exact same thing. Even when one would play an acoustic guitar and the other an electric, their hands were almost robotically synchronous.

I'm well aware that a lot of music is subjective, that different people have different tastes, and that everyone is entitled to like what they like. But there is undeniably still an objective part of music -- technical proficiency, artistic integrity, bold creativity --and while these are often extremely difficult to quantify, it's clear that Nickelback is severely lacking.