All The Right Reasons

"Follow You Home" introduces Nickelback's fourth album with rapid-fire machine gun rhythms (courtesy of replacement drummer Daniel Adair) making way for monstrous guitar riffs, with a wah-wah pedaled solo bleeding into Chad Kroeger's throaty singing as he muses on the mindset of a serial stalker. It's a creepy way to set the tone for All the Right Reasons, but Nickelback excels at creating the kinds of sounds and imagery that will get into your head and disturb the conscience while simultaneously rocking you. The album is best known for "Side of a Bullet," a powerful, hard rocking tribute to the late Dimebag Darrell Abbott of Pantera whose haunting, posthumous guitar solo was overdubbed here. Fans of the band's melodramatic power ballads get a couple of back-to-back heart stringers with the romantic "Savin' Me" and the acoustic based "Far Away." The retrospective "Photograph" is not a Def Leppard cover, but a trip down high school memory lane that balances balladry in the verses with heavier, hook-laden choruses. "Rockstar" fails to make fun of celebrities by coming off more self-loathing than sardonic, but the three live bonus cuts make for a good way to end a good album.