“How You Remind Me” is a Perfect Song

For as long as I’ve been interested in music, Nickelback have been a punching bag for people who want to feel superior in their taste to others. Part of this makes sense: Nickelback are a very bad band who make atrocious music that deserves to be mocked at every turn, yet are irritatingly popular, making them an easy target and emblematic of Everything That is Wrong With Music. On the other hand, I started to almost feel bad for Chad Kroeger and co., who have never really professed to being more than a dumb rock band that makes big loud noises for people who don’t really want to engage with music on a deeply intellectual level.

The way I see it, there are a lot of awful bands deserving of mockery out there, and Nickelback’s crimes against music don’t really rate to me. It’s easy for me to just not pay attention to Nickelback, but there are bands who I don’t think are much better who are often shoved in my face as an example of “real music.” One of these is The Black Keys, and their drummer Patrick Carney went off on Nickelback in a Rolling Stone story a couple years ago:

Rock & roll is dying because people became OK with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world… So they became OK with the idea that the biggest rock band in the world is always going to be shit – therefore you should never try to be the biggest rock band in the world. Fuck that! Rock & roll is the music I feel the most passionately about, and I don’t like to see it fucking ruined and spoon-fed down our throats in this watered-down, post-grunge crap, horrendous shit. When people start lumping us into that kind of shit, it’s like, ‘Fuck you,’ honestly.

You can hear the superiority and condescension coming from this guy whose band is a fourth-rate White Stripes knockoff. The Black Keys have every bit of Nickelback’s cynicism and lack of originality while sounding even worse. Every song is like one garbage guitar riff played 100 times in a row. And yet he has the temerity to classify his band as “real rock and roll” — this is what is worthy of scorn, not Nickelback minding their own business with their crummy rock music (thanks for your contributions to the Bojack Horseman soundtrack, though).

He does make a decent point about post-grunge, which is like the Mariana Trench of music — it goes lower than humans can possibly fathom, and at the very bottom there are hideous things that we can’t even comprehend (Hinder’s “Lips of an Angel” comes to mind). But within this foul genre of music, Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” holds up as a landmark work that is perfection of a specific aesthetic, much in the way that Loveless and Pet Sounds are.

The style of “How You Remind Me” happens to be one that I don’t really enjoy — this grunty, faux-masculine, whiny brand of rock where every element of the music sounds like it’s been run through a garbage disposal. I prefer listening to women sing about dreams. At the same time, I’m a man who can appreciate the very best of a specific thing, and “How You Remind Me” is indisputably Nickelback’s magnum opus and the high-point of this type of rock music. While the rest of post-grunge is truly offensive and makes one wonder how centuries of human evolution reached this point, “How You Remind Me” reaches the level of being borderline tolerable.

“How You Remind Me,” is, at its core, a song about not wanting to be reminded of who you really are. Its lyrics are a key part of its success because of their relatability: who among us hasn’t cut it as a wise man or as a poor man stealing? Kroeger’s goat-like voice conveys a man who has reached rock bottom and has nothing left to lose. The repeated lyric, “are we having fun yet?,” asks a potent question to the listener, who is left to decide for themselves whether or not Kroeger is, in fact, having fun yet. I personally think he isn’t, but the beauty of “How You Remind Me” is in its ambiguity.

The song’s sound is a bracing mix of many varied influences: Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, and also Pearl Jam. It’s loud in a way that is typically associated with rock music, but the guitar sound lacks any kind of edge or meaning. This emptiness is, intentionally or unintentionally, a vital part of its status as the definitive crappy adolescent post-grunge song. It captures a certain angsty youthful state where you have extreme feelings and frustrations that feel real in the moment but are really just idiotic and pointless. It spawned many imitators, but none were ever able to do it this well, partly because Nickelback have an undeniable ability to craft a hook or they never would have gotten on the radio.

Am I saying that “How You Remind Me” is the greatest song of all time? Of course not. I think The Beatles have a few songs that are better, and others would point to songs by The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Mozart, etc. But I maintain that it is a perfect song in the sense that it achieves everything it is trying to do. It has a certain bleakness and impotence that makes it the quintessential post-grunge song, ahead of even Scott Stapp’s impressive body of work. I don’t quite classify it as “so bad it’s good” — more like it’s so good at being bad.

Infinite Void’s “Endless Waves” is a Perfect Farewell

In what is becoming a disturbing trend, I’m in love with a band that doesn’t exist anymore. Australia’s Infinite Void have already broken up prior to the release of their second full-length, Endless Waves, which casts a bit of a pall over the proceedings. On the other hand, there is some value in breaking up at the top of your game. Endless Waves is such a perfect distillation of this band’s style and such a strong set of songs start to finish that it would have proved difficult to improve upon if they tried.

Out of all the subjective elements of music, maybe the biggest one is what makes a great rock song. Lately, I’ve been really into bands that sound a lot like Infinite Void: aggressive yet ethereal with a bit of a goth tinge coming from the rumbling bass lines and reverbed guitar. Alicia Sayes’ vocals sound more withdrawn and distant, which leads to the band’s distinct sound that falls somewhere in between punk and dream pop.

The lyrics don’t feel like a major emphasis of this album that is really about the sound, but they focus on the types of motifs that fit music that is dark and dreamy — for example, the opening song “Dark Dreams” is about dark dreams. “Face in the Window” is another highlight, and the titular image is one that is a bit unsettling and creepy. That leads into an instrumental, “The Long Night,” followed by “Reflection,” which hypnotizes with its spacious sound and rolling bass. It’s one of my favorite sequences on an album this year.

It can be a bit tough to convince anyone to listen to an album by a band that is already broken up — it can feel like you’re inviting people to a party that already happened. And there is the sad reality that other music writers won’t be incentivized to write about or promote this album, which is going to keep it obscure. It’s too bad, because none of that has any impact on the actual music, which is so solidly written, thoughtfully sequenced, and has all these compelling tensions in it. Infinite Void deserve a wider cult following that they may never get.

“Bon Voyage” is the Sound of Melody Prochet’s Imagination

There are many elements in Bon Voyage, the new album by Melody’s Echo Chamber, that I should dislike. There’s the Ron Burgundy flute section in “Cross Your Heart,” the scat singing in “Cross Your Heart,” that autotuned part in “Desert Horse,” the out-of-place metal guitar riff in “Desert Horse,” the screeching vocals in “Desert Horse,” that guy randomly shouting in a different language in “Desert Horse,” and all of the other things in “Desert Horse.”

This album is an absolute mess and I love it. After years of listening and writing and being kind of fatigued with music at times, it is so refreshing to hear an album that is so different, so unexpected, so creative. Bon Voyage is the follow-up to Melody Prochet’s self-titled 2013 album, and it definitely feels like she is cramming five years of kooky ideas into a relatively short (seven songs, 33 minutes) album. The closest comparison I can think of is Blueberry Boat by the Fiery Furnaces — that was another album that was cryptic and baffling and left the listener unsure if the creators were geniuses or just incoherent musicians.

Bon Voyage is even more remarkable because Prochet’s last album, while enjoyable, was fairly safe and predictable. It was classic shoegazey dream pop, like the noisier side of Broadcast, and the songs all went the obvious way and sounded like a lot of other bands. On this album, the songs never go the way you expect them to; they careen back and forth between different melodies, rhythms, genres and tempos, never settling in one place or on one idea. This makes it jarring and disorienting, and as hinted in the first paragraph, it’s unlikely that any one listener will enjoy every single thing Prochet throws at them on this album.

But isn’t that how it should be? The sound of someone’s imagination shouldn’t always be exactly what we want or expect — that would be excruciatingly boring, which is one word that can’t be applied to Bon Voyage whether you love it or hate it. This is a purely forward-thinking album in the shoegaze/dream pop realm that is too often about worshiping the past.

Here’s a weird thing about Bon Voyage: the parts I mentioned in the first paragraph, all things I normally hate in music, might be my favorite parts of the album. While initially off-putting, after several listens I embraced this album’s eccentricities because it was so fun to hear an artist just try everything and not care. Instead of turning the album off, they made me want to keep listening to hear what she would do next.

People who enjoy doing such things can try to psychoanalyze Prochet and figure out why she made an album like this. There was the relatively high-profile break-up with Kevin Parker of Tame Impala (who produced her last album) and a vague serious accident that left her with broken vertebrae and a brain aneurysm. With six years in between albums, there was obviously a lot of pent-up creativity. It all came out in a gloriously scattered way, and I think the music largely speaks for itself without needing any narratives attached to it.

All of the quirks of this album are the obvious talking points, which can overshadow that Prochet is still very good at traditional singing and songwriting. The back half of Bon Voyage chills out a bit and is more the straight-forward dream pop that she was previously known for, and even its weirdest songs have addictive hooks in them. This is a lot more than some random hodgepodge of sounds: there is a real internal logic to what Prochet is doing, and every second of this album is imbued with the intoxicating spirit of freedom and creativity.