Godsmack

1000hp

Written by: MBC on 01/09/2014 17:14:26

So apparently Godsmack are still around, and almost twenty years into the Boston-based band’s career they are still putting out records. According to a press release, they have sold over 20 million records and their last album “The Oracle” from 2010 debuted at #1 on Bilboard’s Top 200, so they must still be doing pretty well. Godsmack have certainly had big hits in their career and albums such as “Awake” and “Faceless” contained very good songs, but have they really ever made a truly amazing album? In any case, on this their sixth full length release “1000hp”, which comes out today, Godsmack stick to their guns and the album is not going to make any big differences for the band; their fans will probably like it and haters will probably hate it.

Album opener “1000hp” (hp stands for horsepower by the way) starts with the sound of a powerful engine being turned on, which might be from the same vehicle that is featured on the atrocious album cover. Here we go then, the song begins and from the get-go it is apparent what kind of album we are dealing with here: Testosterone filled macho hard rock that has not gotten any more sophisticated with age. The songs are built around simple, hard riffs and the unmistakable manly yawp of vocalist Sully Erna. The title track is an autobiographical tale of the band’s humble beginnings and ultimate triumph in the music business: “Time to rewind back to 1995 when we were nothing walking through the streets of Boston, no one listening, no one caring about the empty rooms we played, until they all showed up for one day, then we took the stage and everything changed”. In typical Erna fashion, the song, and the rest of the album for that matter, is filled with Hetfield-esque yeahhhhhhhs and over-pronunciations of certain syllables. Thusly he rimes the words louder, faster, hour and power in the chorus, and these words pretty much sum up the band’s attitude to song writing; turn on the engine and go full speed ahead.

There are no particularly great songs on the album, but a few are rather good for what they are. “Something Different” has good vocal melodies in both verse and chorus, where Erna shows his uncanny ability to rhyme words that otherwise would not by stressing a certain syllable or stretching out a certain word: “Something wrong, something right, something missing, something black, something light, something different, don’t you ever feel you need to speak to me that way”. “I Don’t Belong” is another rather good song, which does however sound very similar to the band’s mega hit, and one of their best songs, “I Stand Alone” both in terms of the guitar riffs, vocal melodies and general structure of the song.

And this is really the big problem with this record; it sounds like the same songs that we have heard over and over again from this band. They are simple hard rock songs that work well for rocking out but not much else. To Godsmack’s credit, they have never really done anything else but be themselves and stick to what they do, which I have to respect them for. However, people looking for a little more depth in their rock than “Get paid, get drunk, get laid and be a punk motherfucker, just hold your fist up high and turn your fingers to the sky, life is good”, as the chorus goes in album closer “Life Is Good”, should probably look elsewhere than on “1000hp”.

5

Download: Something Different, Generation Day, I Don’t Belong
For the fans of: Hellyeah, Metallica, Disturbed, Saliva, Rob Zombie
Listen: Facebook

Release date 01.09.2014
Spinefarm Records/Universal Music

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.