The Singles Jukebox

A wild metal band appears…

[Video][Website]
[4.08]

Patrick St. Michel: Godsmack used dickheaded self-mythologizing. It’s super effective!
[1]

Scott Mildenhall: Such literal storytelling can be clumsy at the best of times, but when it’s so self-mythologising it is never not foolish, as if performing your own X Factor intro. Once that’s aside though, there’s better to pay attention to: an intricate racket with an indelible riff upon its breakdown, and a chorus that supplements in all the right spots. Better acquainted listeners might respond differently, but as a rarity it’s pleasant enough.
[5]

Megan Harrington: For whatever reason, probably my age relative to these bands, career retrospective songs have been popping up with frequency this year and “1000hp” is one of the dumber, though in a pleasant way. I believe this is, without any subtlety, the Godsmack story. No one cared, then they did, and if you want to know the secret, just play it loud and fast. Godsmack don’t fill that niche for me, but I can see how they might be a satisfying legacy for Boston. 
[7]

David Sheffieck: If I have to listen to guys with guitars, I’d much rather have it be a driving rock version of “Started from the Bottom” than a sensitive guy with an acoustic singing about a girl done him wrong. I’ve never listened to Godsmack, but god help me: I kinda wanna know what they were up to in 1995.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The chorus rhymes and riffs reinforce the power to bewitch that the lyrics describe. A perfect little exercise, no more no less.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: FACT: Godsmack have never met a two-note riff they didn’t slavishly love. FACT: Sully Erna’s voice is still the sound of Guy Fieri hairdos, Hardy Boyz xtremitiez and infected tragus piercings. FACT: They’re still terrible!
[1]

Thomas Inskeep: I am truly alarmed by how not-awful I find this. Godsmack are to my ears one of the main offenders of current butt-rock, but this has a real, genuine propulsion to it, and makes me think of good hard rock from the mid-’90s. I wouldn’t necessarily seek this out, but if it came on the radio, I wouldn’t change the station, either. 
[5]

John Seroff: The one adjective I never would’ve thought to describe Godsmack is “cute” and yet that’s pretty much all that comes to mind when listening to this Horatio Algeresque look back from the perennial nu-metal poster boys. The lead singer name drops Nirvana as a point of comparison, but I’m hearing “1000hp” as a quasi-cover of “Kickstart My Heart” by way of both Helmet and Hedwig, which is simply adorable. When you ask so nicely, how could I not turn that shit up louder?
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: I did not expect to hear reminiscences so sensitively detailed as “walking through the streets of Boston: no one listening/No one caring about the empty rooms we played” over clenched guitars that growl with the cold force of masculine stoicism. The mix is repressive: when the chorus urges “Turn that shit up louder, make it all go faster,” it isn’t possible for the music to obey.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Not that they were particularly witchy in their heyday — mostly they came off as the kind of guys who own snakes — but Godsmack knew the drama of dynamics. This is a plodding origin story slathered with their trademark yowling wah, a generic Grand Funk-style ode to selling 90,000 copies of their last record. Just grim stuff.
[3]

Anthony Easton: This does not feel alive, and the obsession with both power and mass audience is more than a little nostalgic. That the power is literal is absurd. Though I do prefer this kind of nostalgic soaked rock formalism than Weezer’s.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Note: Godsmack drummer Shannon Larkin (who is for lack of a better term, a BEAST, and should never be held responsible for his source of income) was once in an obscure groove-metal band called Souls At Zero. That name, coming from a Clive Barker novel, also belongs to a classic album by atmospheric post-metal titans Neurosis. So for a very long time when older metalheads would just dismissively tell me “Souls At Zero were a much better band” than Godsmack, I’d concur, but occasionally wonder if something like the riff rock turned into pseudo-ethnic “depth” on songs like “I Stand Alone” was actually the band trying to make a commercially palatable version of Neurosis. I dreamed of a world where it was Godsmack, not Isis or Pelican, who were the true inheritors of that sound. The reason why I bring all this up, is because my dream origin of Godsmack is 100 times more interesting than listening to them memorialize themselves over this generic butt-rock.
[1]