Nickelback NO FIXED ADDRESS (BN)

Always a tad bit cleverer than he's ever given credit for, Chad Kroeger is perfectly aware not only of his encroaching middle age but also the shifting commercial marketplace and where Nickelback fit within that. No Fixed Address, Nickelback's eighth album and by some measure their most adventurous record, doesn't find Kroeger abandoning his gift for brutish hooks, but he has moved his band away from its reliance on Paleozoic power chords. This is entirely a production move. He writes the same kinds of songs, but he's swapped out canned digital distortion for burbling cauldrons of EDM, looping rhythms so it appears they overlap (although he never hints at anything like a polyrhythm), ladling synthesizers into every empty crevice, carving out space for Flo Rida on "Got Me Runnin' Round," and going full-bore disco on "Get 'Em Up" and "She Keeps Me Up." The barely disguised double-entendre joke in that latter title shows Kroeger still finds smuttiness irresistible -- and he can still find