I must say before this review starts that this is the only Godsmack record I own and I only have it because a person from school gave me the whole actual album for free. So I don’t really know much about the band. Although I do know that this record did end up going platinum. The best way I can describe the overall sound of this record is that it is the true definition of hard rock. This record separates rock and metal. It is in no way just plain rock just as much as it is not metal. If I could make up a genre for it I might call it either voodoo rock or voodoo metal and that’s not because of the popular song they have off of one of their other albums, Sully Erna’s voice earns it that title.
This album came as a real surprise to me. I had only heard the slower songs from this band from the album
Faceless and had no clue about how much heavier and just plain better the band’s other work was. This album certainly isn’t the most consistent record I’ve ever heard, but it comes damn close to it. The record never loses it’s in your face pace style of music while still having the soothing vocals of Sully Erna that can also be quite brutal at the same time. Sully Erna is most likely the best possible voice that could go with this music and the only other singer that I know of that would come close to fitting well with this band would be Serj Tankian of System of a Down, but not entirely.
The instrumentation on the album Awake is fairly impressive from all members. Guitarist Tony Rombola combines straight up regular chord based riffs with some nice solos once in a while to create an impressive record that fits well with every instrument including the vocals. Bass player Robbie has his moments as well, obviously on the song
Goin’ Down which features a nice little bass movement in the first half of the song. The drums from Tommy has nice beats throughout and compliments the music nicely, but doesn’t show the true potential I think that this drummer secretly has lying underneath. As said before Sully Erna is probably the best vocalist for this music and is what undoubtedly keeps this album from becoming to repetitive, which is the problem with this album. Even though Sully’s vocals keep record from becoming repetitive to quickly, it still eventually becomes repetitive, mainly because the actual variety on the instruments isn’t too great.
My favorite song on this record is most likely the song
Trippin’ because of the great vocals on the song and the guitar, bass, and drum parts just stick out to me even though they do seem like many of the other songs on the record, but I must say I love the guitar solo this song sports. There are no real weak songs on the record, which is a definite plus, but once again the record does become repetitive after a while, but that is the only weakness that I find on the song. Another plus that I have with this record is that it is longer than most bands have their albums these days coming in at fourty-five minutes. Some may scoff at me for saying fourty-five minutes is long, but trust me when I say that most bands these days that fit under this genre album’s are just thirty to thirty-five minutes long. Overall this record is probably a 3.5 to 4 out of 5 for me and is simply put, a great hard rock record.
