Producers: Nickelback, Chris Baseford
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AllMusic · 3.0 / 5 · · 2026-07-25 08:30:13
EveryDisc · 3.0 / 5 · · 2017-10-13 12:41:22
5 hits in the Billboard Top 10 and 5 albums in the Top 5 under your belt — that is baggage that begins to drag you to the bottom. Especially if you mostly write commercially oriented mid-tempo post-grunge and not far distant ballads. You think that success is in your hands and from now on you just need to follow the scheme. That is how the previous CD of the Canadian team was born - No Fixed Address. The most unmemorable material. By inertia it was still at the top, but sales dropped many times over. By my expectations Feed the machine was supposed to show a further path of development or regression. The most powerful, but at the same time not dynamic compositions are interspersed with standard stadium ballads — that is what we hear on the new album. Are you surprised? Kroeger still pleases, having cured a cyst on his vocal cords, although he is no longer that "demon" that Corey Taylor considered him to be. It is like the same Nickelback, but not quite. It reeks of some agony to save the situation. All the knobs are turned up to the maximum. One wants it to be more melodic, then faster. Constantly something is not dialed in correctly. The best tracks are Feed the machine and Coin for the ferryman. Ryan Peake does not disappoint in several jaw-dropping solos. Overall the album sounds, of course, better than the previous one, but again it is terribly lacking in hits (for Nickelback this is critical). Hope returns with The Betrayal (Act III), which is maximally intense and follows precisely the path of later Slipknot. Here the demon from the most rocking things of 2001 — 2011 returns. It turned out somehow strange. For those who love stadium sing-alongs, there is nothing tasty here (one complete mess), for those who like their frantic (though quite monotonous) drive, there is one (and that with a stretch) thing. Will Feed the machine find its audience? A big question (just of the category — progress or regression? Or maybe stagnation?). Of course, Canada always remains, where it makes no difference what material is recorded on the new disc of the Kroeger brothers and Co.
Independent review