NICKELBACK

By Joe Matera

When Canadian rockers Nickelback released their USA debut "The State" in March 2000, two singles from the album "Leader Of Men" and "Breathe" went top ten on the mainstream charts and brought the band their first taste of major success. Touring ceaselessly for "The State", the band would go from virtual unknowns to playing in front of over one million people alongside the likes of Three Doors Down, Creed and Fuel.

Now with their follow-up "Silver Side Up" album, the band continues its winning streak with the album debuting at #2 on the U.S Billboard’s "Top 200" albums" chart, #1 on the Canadian charts and going gold within weeks of release in Australia.

Due to the success of both the album and it’s first single "How You Remind Me", with it’s emotionally charged lyrics striking a chord with Australian audiences, the quartet which comprises vocalist/guitarist Chad Kroeger and his brother Mike on bass along with Ryan Peake on guitars/vocals and Ryan Vikedal on drums, arrived in Australia in the later part of October to play two sell-out shows, one in Melbourne and the other in Sydney.

"It’s great to come to Australia and play sold-out shows first time over" remarked Peake to Australian Musician the day after their show at the Mercury Lounge. The band’s current success is much overdue as they have been slugging it on the live circuit for years and before signing with Roadrunner Records, were themselves doing everything on a do-it-yourself work ethic.

"We fired our managers right in the middle of recording "The State" and for, like a year, we promoted and distributed everything on our own, including releasing the album independently. Then finally that Summer we’d been solicited by record companies and got picked up by Roadrunner".

So what was the writing process for "Silver Side Up" like? "In the writing process for the album" begins Peake, "Chad usually brought in the skeleton of the songs and we’ll either add a bridge here or say ‘I don’t like the way this chord progression is going’ or something like that, and mess around with it and do a lot of arranging before we go into the studio. We actually do a lot of preproduction, we did tons of it before we got into the studio because it’s expensive and we like to have our stuff together before we go in there" he reveals. "For this album we spent 5 weeks in the studio as once we hopped into the studio we knew exactly what were were going to do as all the bed tracks and basics were done. That's when the real work and fun began, when we started adding the colour to it, and pieces here and there, the layering and experimenting. We had time for this album, where unlike with the previous album, we hadn’t time and it was like ‘ok, good enough, next song, we’ve got to move on, we haven’t got much time left’. This time, 5 weeks is still not that long, but it was long enough that we got done what we needed to get done".

When asked how the band gets its big guitar sound that accompanies Nickelback’s hard-edged melodic rock Peake says "We both play through Triple Rectifiers for the dirty channel, the dirty sound. We have two (Mesa) Boogie cabinets and we’re actually in the process of getting two Marshall cabinets, cause they’re two different sounds. I like the Boogie sounds, they’re really clear and clean, but the Marshall cabinet is big, fat and meaty and it just cuts and I really like that. That’s actually coming in next week" he continues. "Guitarwise, I play through a Fender Telecaster on stage, that’s one of my guitars I play. My other is a Gibson ES135, a hollowbody I just got not long ago and totally fell in love with. I took my Tele and cut out the single coil pick-ups and put in EMG humbuckers, and with the Boogie you have balls! I’ve never really been a fan of EMG pick-ups before that, but now I’m really impartial to those things now. I also have a Gibson SG Gothic. As for Chad he uses Paul Reed Smith guitars exclusively".

The band isn’t big on using many effects in it’s musical equation, preferring to use instead a very basic set-up. "My typical thing is a Vox Wah pedal and a Boss Digital Delay, and that's about it" Peake enthuses. "Chad does use a talk-box but we didn’t bring it here, which is unfortunate. He uses that on a few songs on the album. We used it on "Breathe", one song from the last album and got to like it." Nickelback do like to utilize different tunings to help colour their arrangements. "All my stuff is in Drop D tuning, while though Chad plays "How You Remind Me" in Drop D, as the bulk of our songs are in Drop D, for a lot of them he’ll Drop C and Drop B, which is why he’s always changing guitars, but I stay where I am".

With their first Australian tour declared a major success, Nickelback are certain to return for a longer spell sometime in the coming new year.