By Keith DeVries

Last night at the sold-out Post-Gazette Pavilion, Nickelback typified the characteristics of rock: hard, forgettable, inanimate.

The Canadian band's arrival was punctuated by explosive pyrotechnic blasts and a 200-foot "Guitar Hero"-style projection that set the tone for the band's bombastic performance as hard-rock caricature artists. With his windblown hair and perfected rock star snarls of "Thank you very much!" between songs, frontman Chad Kroeger led the crowd of 20,000 through an hour and a half of consistent arena-rock sing-alongs such as "Rockstar," "How You Remind Me" and "Someday," after supporting sets from Hinder, Papa Roach and Saving Abel.

Nickelback kicked it off with the energetic stomp of "Something in Your Mouth," a truly tasteless up-tempo paean to the heady days of hair-metal misogyny. From its new album, "Dark Horse," the song was an ambitious step away from the band's popular power ballads, exploring new territory via heavy glam-dance synthesizer and a strange harmonized rap breakdown with an Axl Rose-meets-"The Thong Song" flavor -- a moment equally incredible and tragic.

Marching on, Kroeger dedicated the hit "Photograph" to the good old days of high school, acknowledging the huge contingent of students in the audience with a laugh. Despite the odd, forced lines such as "This is where I grew up / I think the present owner fixed it up," the song has already been crowned with glory on forlorn schoolhouse slow-dance floors.

The applause meter was off the charts during the song's nostalgic collage when it shifted from backstage candids to images of the City of Champions and portraits of Penguins and Steelers heroes.

Nickelback reached for a wide audience through bawdy stage banter, face-warming blasts of onstage fire, and covers of "Friends in Low Places" and "Highway to Hell" (featuring Hinder's Austin Winkler and Papa Roach's Jacoby Shaddix doing their best Kriss Angel-as-Malcolm Young impressions). Despite their tough, modern-day gladiator veneer, these prolific rockers proved themselves masters of the soft-hearted anthem with interchangeably formulaic but contagious hooks. Unfortunately, Nickelback's legacy probably lies in soft-rock elevators and "NOW" compilations rather than the nu-metal coliseums of the future.

After the band's seventh-inning stretch, complete with cannon-fired T-shirts, Nickelback attempted to have "every soul on the hill" singing along to "How You Remind Me," and the band came pretty close as the stage volume was cut to let the massive chants ring out.

The encore featured "Burn It to the Ground," a rollicking, raging ode to partying, looting, arson and good-spirited fun, before closing out the night with an extended version of "Someday."

Before Nickelback and after the vitriolic hip-hop mosh of aggressive depressives Papa Roach, Hinder took the stage with its own brand of sensitive alternative rock. The Oklahoma group worked through a 45-minute set that peaked with the band's hit "Lips of an Angel," a ballad that featured Winkler's John Mayer-esque rasp and a hard-hitting chorus that smacked of the metallic verse-chorus tropes of modern rock radio, the same ones shared by opening band Saving Abel's hit "Addicted."