With ‘No Fixed Address,' fresh reasons to roll your eyes at Nickelback

You put on the new Nickelback album and you expect to hear big guitars, booming drums and quite a few hearty endorsements of sex.

What you don’t expect is a song about the National Security Agency. Or a guest appearance by Flo Rida. Or a disco cut featuring backing vocals by Ali Tamposi, who has worked withOne Direction.

Those are just a few of the surprising things about “No Fixed Address,” the latest record from this Canadian hard-rock band.

I’m not saying the album is a total reinvention. But it’s definitely weird: a deviation from a formula that’s sold tens of millions of Nickelback albums and yielded such rock-radio staples as “How You Remind Me” and the excellent “Photograph.”

In “Edge of a Revolution,” frontman Chad Kroeger ponders what he sees as the government’s dependence on “mass confusion” to distract us from its wrongdoing. “Hey, hey / Just obey,” he growls over a crunching riff, “Your secret’s safe with the NSA.”

“She Keeps Me Up” sets a series of sleazy come-ons against a throbbing dance-floor groove similar to the one in “Got Me Runnin’ Round,” where Flo Rida promises to chase a woman like Belvedere – the vodka, one presumes, not the TV butler.

Far less shocking than the appealing quirks on “No Fixed Address” is the critical reaction to the album, which as usual has focused on how “fascinatingly average” Nickelback is, to quote Rolling Stone.

The band’s success has obliged observers to pay attention (or pretend to, anyway).

But because Nickelback’s value set overlaps only minimally with that of many of those observers, the group is actually one that can be hard for certain people to hear. I mean, provided you listen, it’s clear that “No Fixed Address” is just not an average rock album – at least not by the standards set by, say, Foo Fighters, whose new “Sonic Highways” is way more ordinary than “No Fixed Address.”

You may not like “No Fixed Address,” but there are plenty of fresh reasons to hate them.