Review Summary: C'est la vie
A few years ago, when Sully Erna was interviewed at a Minneapolis radio station, he opened up and said that
Lighting Up the Sky would be Godsmack's final album, and then followed up by clarifying that there may be a chance that they go back on their word and enter the studio again, in his words, "one more for the road". For the sake of this review, this album will be treated as a farewell piece to the band, who have been lighting up arenas and doing their thing since 1995 when they cribbed their name from the namesake Alice in Chains song "God Smack", and releasing albums at a steadily slowing pace as the years went on. Surely for a supposed farewell album, they'd try to switch it up a little, go a little outside the box, and leave us on a high note, one would presume. After all, they've given us plenty of radio-rock anthems that amount to little more than "go away / keep away / stay away" when you look into it with a critical eye, so surely a level of self-reflection and personal growth could come out of it if they're truly serious about the finality, right?
Well, you see the rating, so what do you
really think?
Godsmack have sort of mastered the art of being consistently below average; they keep chugging along, recycling the same riffs, the same grunt-y Hetfield-worship vocals from Sully, the same posturing, aggressive lyrics, and it all kind of leads to the same result every time. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, and Erna and co. seem content with the final album feeling exactly the same as the last seven studio releases. There is no progression, but since everything is still played with about the same amount of energy, if you still get something out of an album like
Awake or
Faceless, you know exactly what you're getting here, and this more or less equals out those. Hell, in other interviews, Sully has admitted to essentially forcing himself to write when he isn't angry or emotional about something because he knows that's his job. Nothing here is played especially worse or better, everything is what you'd expect. You know what you're getting with this band, and this is about par for the course for them.
The only deviation is that they do take a short break from the aforementioned "go away" lyricism on two songs; "Truth" and "Red, White & Blue". The former is a sappy breakup song that's played with a level of heart that hasn't been seen in years from the band, and the latter feels like the same type of rah-rah pro-America rants that have been getting more and more inane as the years go on. However, even in those moments, it doesn't feel like anything you wouldn't hear on a Staind record post-Aaron Lewis going insane. "I never thought I'd say, one day I'd question my faith to a country that made me who I am today", Erna says as he tries to rally the crowd of red-state rockers he so flagrantly panders to. Elsewhere on the record is again, the same old story repeated ad nauseum; on "Surrender", he tells the target of the song that "this is where I draw the line for the last time", a sentiment we have heard on pretty much every other record this band has ever made. Themes of aging do creep up toward the end on tracks like "Growing Old", but it's like, these guys are all in their mid-50s, is that really surprising?
It's kind of insane how much longevity these guys have been able to get out of consistently doing the same thing over and over, with the closest thing to a "reinvention" being them lightening up for one album in
When Legends Rise. The title track of that album being the theme for multiple years of WWE's live events in Saudi Arabia definitely shows that the formula has managed to work for them, but one has to wonder what artistic heights they could have reached if they just tried for something a little bit different and subtly progressed instead of just being the same dudes who wrote "Cryin' Like a Bitch" over and over and over again. If this is the end of your run, at least you never made an album quite as crass in its motivations as Theory of a Deadman's
The Truth Is..., Godsmack. At least there's that.
