Godsmack
When Legends Rise

LA RECENSIONE

Godsmack get a makeover. Without overdoing the process of approaching modern rock sounds, the band of the now fifty-year-old Sully Erna returns with heads held high and rejuvenated by a few years with a self-referentially titled album: "When Legends Rise." To many, Godsmack has never seemed like legends, and they are not (except in Boston), but the courage to always keep their foot on the accelerator has never been lacking for the Massachusetts quartet, becoming a distinctive character in a jungle, today comparable to a chaotic web network, where many young bands play at being bad more on social media and on their own skin than in the recording studio.
"When Legends Rise" is the first album where Sully Erna has decided (whether he or the record label is unknown) to replace during production Dave Fortman, who worked on the last two albums, with Erik Ron, a young American musician and producer who has already worked with Panic At The Disco! and Blessthefall; essentially a completely different music compared to the canonical sounds of Godsmack, which however do not suffer negatively from these new influences, rather extracting strengths from them.
The pair of tracks "When Legends Rise" and "Bulletproof," while staying within the band's perimeter and in Erna's undulating notes, his trademark, express a modern rock feeling also due to the way Tony Rombola's guitar sounds, less raw and more muffled, and for electronics that are never intrusive.
The other aspect that characterizes the album is a return, this time to the past, to hard rock sounds that partly replace their metal; the distortions of "Unforgettable" sound like 1990s Metallica, the choruses, those worn-out and overused in modern productions, accompany without invading. There is, as always, room for Erna's more intimate side, already fully displayed in his solo work "Avalon" and from which, calling back the American cellist Irina Chirkova, he showcases the best in "Under Your Scars," among the key tracks of the album.
The last part of the album, a bit short with a duration of less than forty minutes, leaves Godsmack a bit freer to showcase their canonical hard rock but not unforgettable, in which the tracks "Let It Out" and "Eye Of The Storm" stand out, with the latter closing the album confirming the nature of an album appropriate for modern times.
As described, Godsmack has not composed the album of a lifetime, but a good hard rock record cleverly aligned with the present, which in a landscape long dry of quality and especially of ideas, gains further value. Without overdoing it or totally succumbing to the trends of the moment, staying anchored to the identity that has characterized them in twenty years of career where American hard rock has had a chance to appreciate them, Godsmack rises again, not quite as legends but certainly as great musicians and professionals.