Miss 1992? Godsmack singer Sully Erna sure does, and he wants you to revisit it with him. Not old enough to intentionally listen to music in 1992? That's all right; Erna doesn't require studying up on his influences to rock along with him — just have a love for loud, heavily distorted guitars, chugging riffs, growling vocals, and simplistic songwriting. It's not metal, but it's not far off either.
Erna and Godsmack's approach is a user-friendly hybrid of every mainstream-yet-heavy musical genre from now back to about 1969, resulting in something that owes incalculable debts to genre standouts from grunge and first-wave British heavy metal in particular. As a distillation, Godsmack is simpler than the sources from which it draws, but this reduction to essentials results in a powerful end product. It's like condensing hard-rock history into a handful of power chords, a dead-ahead beat, and a whole lot of viscera. Simple, but strangely satisfying.
