GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- You might accuse me of lying if I said the mothership came down and lifted Nickelback off the Van Andel Arena stage Thursday night.

But it’s true, sort of. Five songs into the rockers’ set, a flying saucer, suspended from the ceiling by cables, picked up the band and floated it, still performing homogenized sing-alongs, to a fenced-off spot in the middle of the general-admission floor crowd. Upon landing, frontman Chad Kroeger declared the evening “just one big (expletive) partyyyyyyyy!”

It was surely a very expensive party. The show’s production – laser lights, regular pyro explosions, bursts of flame, digital screens, etc. – looked like a gazillion bucks, and ticket prices were roughly half that. But if you’re spending between $50 and $100 (after service fees) to see Nickelback, you better get a lot of kerpow, and the band didn’t fail to deliver the Big Rock Show theatrics for an audience numbering just shy of 10,000.

Of course, this is all at the service of a musical formula that, to be kind, sucks. It’s simplistic, watery and artificial. Playing on a stage big enough to fit several focus groups, Nickelback churned through 15 songs from its decade-plus of anthems, which fall into three categories: strained mid-tempo grunge slogs, mindlessly strummed quasi-country rockers and imbecilic caveman sub-metal that sounds like low-IQ “Load”-era Metallica.

REVIEW: 2 OUT OF 4 STARS

'Shame'

Nickelback with opening acts Bush, Seether, My Darkest Days

When and where: Thursday night at Van Andel Arena

Highlight: The suspended mini-stage that suspended Nickelback above the crowd created quite the spectacle.

Lowlight: "Would you like some half-cups of beer thrown at you?" Kroeger asked the crowd. Groan.

Set time: 90 minutes

Attendance: Just under 10,000

The peabrained chuggery of crass, sexist sleaze-rockers “Something in Your Mouth” and “Figured You Out” at least produced some energy, and was preferable to a trudge through a constipated grunt like “Never Again,” the band’s inarticulate ode to domestic violence in which the lyrics tell the story of a man who takes pleasure in beating a woman (“Kicking your ass would be a pleasure” goes one line) until she shoots him dead.

Gutless crud such as “Photograph,” notably a huge international crossover hit, and “Far Away,” dedicated “to the ladies,” were enough to bemoan the emergence of an acoustic guitar, which Kroeger or lead guitarist Ryan Peake played far too often. By comparison, “Animals” seemed mighty rocking, and it’s worth mention that the song’s about picking up a young female (“Your mom don't know that you were missing,” sang Kroeger) and, if I’m correctly translating the innuendo here, engaging in intercourse repetitively in a primitive fashion.

Just to show that Nickelback is emotionally diverse, Peake sat down at a piano for "Lullaby," which was followed by the hokiest of we-must-stand-together rah-rah anthems, appropriately titled "When We Stand Together." Kroeger said the latter was about "all of mankind uniting and making the world a better place," which was funny, because mankind is clearly divided between those who love Nickelback and those who hate Nickelback, and is more likely to come together with the destruction of Nickelback.

Towards the end of the show, Kroeger asked the crowd, “Would you like some half-cups of beer thrown at you?”, and then proceeded to “jam on some metal” with his bandmates as stagehands threw half-cups of beer into the crowd, hopefully to those aged 21 and older, not that any of the beer was consumable by the time it flew through the air and landed in your lap. The band then hammered away at frat-rocker “Burn it to the Ground,” which is about getting plowed and breaking stuff, as flamepots whooshed.

And here is the part of the review where I mention the drum solo. It happened. Now, we move on.

Now, The ’Back clearly understands that arena shows need to be entertaining enough to reach the back row. At this, they are a whopping success, without argument, and the Van Andel Arena crowd responded accordingly. But the band’s music is terribly artless. It’s arranged and assembled using monosyllabic verbiage and generic emotion, and therefore exists solely to be shouted across hockey rinks or pumped into your car stereo for mildly hummable background noise. Is this a bad thing, to make ultimately forgettable, emotionally contrived music that exists in the moment, to give people release? If the alternative is physically assaulting another human being, I guess not.

Opening the show were Bush, Seether and My Darkest Days. You may remember Bush as a late-1990s arena headliner, once broken up, now reassembled by handsome frontman Gavin Rossdale, who pranced about the stage playing grunge-radio hits “Machine Head,” “Glycerine” and “Comedown” during the 40-minute set. Rossdale tossed a Talking Heads reference into an extended jam on “Everything Zen,” and ran through the crowd while singing Beatles cover “Come Together.” The former act baffled; the latter sort of made up for it.

South Africa’s Seether garnered a lukewarm response to its 40 minutes of generic wallet-chain mope-rock, with only the acoustic twang of “Country Song” leaving anything resembling an impression. My Darkest Days got 20 minutes to strut in their spraypainted mohawks and skinny jeans, with “Porn Star Dancer” sounding slick like Linkin Park and sleazy like Motley Crue.

Email: jserba@mlive.com or follow John Serba on Twitter