FRISCO – Suburbs are safe, homogenous, convenience-riddled places to live.
Similarly, Nickelback and Daughtry are safe, homogenous, convenience-riddled rock bands to see live.
Now you know why Sunday's concert featuring America's two best-selling modern-rock acts went down way up yonder at Pizza Hut Park.
It's not because places such as Smirnoff Music Centre or American Airlines Center couldn't handle the comfortably dressed suburbanite- and female-dominated 14,000 or so that attended.
In this case, the acts performed a concert as smooth, transparent and inventive as gelatin, right in the relative back yards of each's thickest base of fans.
The meat of Nickelback's presentation was largely the same as its 2006 Smirnoff gig.
Rex C. Curry / Special to DMN
Nickelback
The sides – a concave stage design with pyro in front of the drum riser and a few set-list tweaks – differed some, but nowhere near enough to satiate those seeking a revamp from last year.
The band did appear more energized; the breezy open-air setting and two cracking and metalized openers, "Animals" and "Woke Up This Morning," helped the Canadian band leap out of its gate.
But the carbon-copy performance of "Photograph" that followed served as a blaring and jangly signal that this turn wouldn't deviate all that much from the past.
Seriously: If you'd sold more than six million copies of your latest album in the past 22 months, would you have changed things up much?
Didn't think so.
So the fans got all of the same regionalized tricks: Cries of "I'm a redneck!" from frontman Chad Kroeger, overdone video montages on social activism to assume the proper P.C. position, local celebrities firing free band swag into the crowd with pneumatic cannons as the band mucked through "Cowboys From Hell" by martyred local metal outfit Pantera.
Thing is, though Nickelback makes few bones about aspiring to be a metal band (and to be fair, it can riff, in bursts, as ruggedly as the Sevendusts and Megadeths of the world), it isn't.
It's too contrived, too hook-obsessed and, well, too safe to be truly metal, unless you count the horribly thick-necked cover of Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)" that it threw forth. Gads.
Neither is Chris Daughtry, whose namesake band of hired hard-rock guns preceded Nickelback with 40 minutes of songs masterfully penned for the lowest common denominator.
Rex C. Curry / Special to DMN
Chris Daughtry
But jeez, did he sound good.
His forceful voice, first showcased on Season Five of American Idol a while back, is actually better than it was then.
He missed no cue, hit every note precisely on tune and absolutely made otherwise standardized numbers such as "Home" and "Crashed" pulse with power.
But he has got work to do on the crowd-engaging front.
He's an arm-flexing, mike-devouring, riser-stomping pose machine that needs to loosen up and allow more than his mightily macho pipes and beefed-up-Prince-with-a-wallet-chain look define him.
Say no to safety, Mr. Daughtry.
Let it go!
