I think “insufferable twerp” says it all, don’t you?

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Jonathan Bradley: Hedley bolts the greased-up fatuousness of mid-’00s Simple Plan to a chorus with Avril ballad-levels of bombast and Deryck Whibley-levels of snottiness. How, um, patriotic of them.
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Alex Ostroff: Hedley are a combination of two pretty awful things: massive success on Canadian Idol and modern rock radio. I’ll cop to having quite enjoyed “Old School” a few years back — a vaguely anthemic song that threw big guitars over plaintive waltz time to deliver sentiments that I would rave about if sung by The Gaslight Anthem or latter-day Against Me! I can’t tell if “Invincible” is more rote and formulaic or if it’s just working off a template that I’m less susceptible to. Maybe I just prefer my cliches and platitudes wrapped up in the “we” of communal nostalgia rather than the “I”s of self-help.
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Doug Robertson: Claiming invincibility requires a certain level of self-belief, regardless of what the facts regarding knives, bullets and clumsily used cheese graters have to say about the matter. Releasing a slice of self-regarding, unimaginative chart rock tosh with all the imagination and charm of a graffiti-strewn wall, presumably under the impression that the public has been crying out for it, requires a similar level of self-belief, but this time, the inevitable pain isn’t limited to the person who holds the delusions. We have to suffer as well.
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Brad Shoup: It’s brain-scrambling to consider the existence of bands, songwriters and producers who thrive on this thin musical gruel, this tuneless, unimaginative prolesploitation. Tattooed ‘n’ plugged boys making thirdhand gestures, straining at the limits of their unspirational range to put over cheap uplift. Songs about nothing but the limits of credulity and the possibilities of television licensing. The soundtrack to microscopic battles, a shotgun blast at a potential demographic, the willingness to submit.
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Jer Fairall: The insufferable twerp who somehow managed to turn a third place finish on Canadian Idol into national success for his band, Jacob Hoggard sounds douchey enough when he’s doing smart-ass punk pop, but he’s absolutely intolerable when tackling ballad material. “Invincible” starts off with just him, a piano and me fearing the worst before settling into a generic kinda mid-tempo rock-pop number that is agreeably catchy and pisses me hardly at all. The lyrics are the usual rock ‘n’ roll survivor cliches, disingenuous as they may be coming from someone who has spent all of six years living in a particularly dim spotlight, but the chorus has a nice little sway to it. Still, the best I can say for this is that I wouldn’t have been able to identify it as Hedley if I didn’t know so beforehand.
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Iain Mew: Delivering the chorus to this otherwise fairly harmless pop-rock song in a weak emo snarl is a mistake from which there is no recovery. The dissonance between the petty whine and weedy backing and the claims of being invincible becomes more ridiculous every time it rolls around. It even makes the falsetto bit look like a good choice.
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Katherine St Asaph: Jacob and bros sing like a bunch of frat pledges forced to pretend they’re Cory Monteith. The result has to fall under some Canadian anti-hazing law.
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Jonathan Bogart: I have a vision of peach polo shirts with popped collars on tanned guys whose blonde hair is a little too blonde to match, gathering in a church parking lot to reinforce their sense of being a persecuted minority. It’s the fault of neither Hedley nor of these straw-man Xian bros that I make such immediate associations, but maybe if you want me to believe that you’re such an underdog that a claim to invincibility is psychologically necessary, don’t be so fucking bougie.
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