GODSMACK @ Metropolis

By Johnny Suck - Turn Down the Suck - 06/12/2006

Even though it’s lame, I still like to go slumming now and then. So you better believe I jumped on a free Godsmack ticket...

On my way over to Metropolis, I passed through the Francofolies site, which had Andrée Waters performing on the main stage. Stopping to watch for a few minutes, I was surprised by how good she was and even thought about sticking around for the whole set, Godsmack be damned. I don’t make light of commitments though, so I grudgingly continued on.

While not entirely eager to see Godsmack, I still thought that there was a chance that I’d like it. Come on, they can’t be one of the biggest hard rock bands around for nothing, right? Well, in the end my general impression of the show was one big meh. Their songs weren’t interesting enough to keep my attention for 3.5 minutes and they weren’t nearly heavy enough. While I probably would have loved Godsmack back when I was 14, I’m way past them now. I realize how incredibly snobby this sounds, but I think the 2000 cheering fans needed to be enlightened in that ways of Rock. Still, for the unenlightened masses -- I’m pretty sure I’m being sarcastic -- it was definitely a good show. I only recognized a few songs but pretty much everything went over well. Front man Sully Erna did a pretty good job of working the crowd, although the repeated "Thank you Canada"’s were silly. It bugs me when a single crowd of people is treated like an entire country. Seriously, the people there were Godsmack fans first, Montrealers second, and Canadians third or fourth.

Nitpicking aside, Sully Erna is still a solid singer with a pretty nice voice, which made it surprising that the best song was an instrumental. I’m a sucker for percussion, so when Erna exchanged his mic for a second drum kit and started getting all tribal, you know I smiled. Throw in a bunch of quality riffing, some "Moby Dick", a bit of "Walk This Way", a touch of Metallica and extend it, extend it, extend it and you’ve got the song of night, hands down. It was exactly the type of thing that you want to hear in concert, rather than just all the same songs that you’ve heard 100 times before, played exactly the same way as on the album.

In the end, I’ll admit that they were alright, just not at all for me.

Highlight: Watching a tag team catfight break out between two Barbie-doll blondes and two ‘big’ girls. The blondes would have gotten pummeled had the fight not been broken up by a couple of idiot guys. Apparently some people don’t know the meaning of the term "erotic hilarity".

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