ADDICTED TO THAT RUSH

Inject some Red Bull, drink some Starbucks and get ready to snort a little Faceless, Godsmack’s new “high-energy rock” album.

Gathered on a New York City street on a brisk January afternoon, the four members of Godsmack look more like a biker gang than a rock band. Two have closely buzzed hair and thick goatees, two have upper torsos that are copiously tattooed and all are dressed, from head to toe, in black. As with any respectable gang, there must be one indisputable leader. For Godsmack, that is frontman Sully Erna, a tireless ball of energy whose mind is constantly running on overdrive. When Erna speaks, everybody stops and listens.

Take this interview for instance. After entering Dorsia, Sully’s newly opened club on Manhattan’s east side, each band member retires to a different area of the main floor to begin a day of press. A few minutes into my discussion with Erna, he’s explaining how Godsmack—who recently enjoyed the biggest hit of their career with “I Stand Alone,” a song written for the soundtrack to the enormously popular movie The Scorpion King--determine whether or not their music is right for a particular film.

”The image of this band has to fit with whatever project we lend our songs to,” says Erna. “For instance, I would never want Godsmack to be associated with a slapstick comedy movie, or something like that. But The Scorpion King was perfect. And a movie that has to do with extreme sports would probably work for us as well. Basically anything that has a lot of energy, because Godsmack is energy music.”

And then he pauses.

”That’s it! That’s the new name for us—‘energy rock.’ Hey, Tony! Robbie! Everybody!”

Erna’s three bandmates—guitarist Tony Rombola, bassist Robbie Merrill and new drummer Shannon Larkin—abruptly halt their respective interviews and look up. The room, once buzzing with the chatter of four different conversations, is now completely silent.

”I just came up with a new name for our sound,” says Erna. “You know how there’s nu-metal, rap rock, garage rock? We’re energy rock!”

As pleased as Erna is with his new phrase, he quickly realizes he has interrupted everyone and lets out a little laugh.

”Sorry about that. I’m done. You can all go back to what you were doing.”

Although Erna’s manners may be questionable, it’s easy to see why he gets so worked up by this moment of clarity: Godsmack have never fit neatly into any particular category. Their two records—1998’s self-titled debut and 2000’s Awake--are stocked with music so straight-forward and stripped of any adornments they almost defy categorization. It sounds new, but it’s not nu-metal; Erna grunts and howls and spits out lyrics, but there’s no hint of rap in his delivery; the melodies are catchy, but they’re certainly not pop. It’s just rock—make that “energy rock.”

It’s this ambiguity that the group references in the title of its new album, Faceless (Republic/Universal). If Godsmack once were uneasy about fitting in among heavy music’s highly segmented subgenres, they now embrace, and even flaunt, their inability to be easily pigeon-holed. And by resisting the trends of the day—be they hip-hop, pop-punk, or lo-fi garage rock—in favor of bashing out caveman style riffs in the vein of the old-school rock and metal acts they grew up on, Godsmack have seen their music become, ironically, quite trendy: to date, Godsmack has sold more than four million copies, and Awake is currently at double-Platinum status.

That is not to say that a Godsmack song is completely indistinguished. The band does have a calling card: its all-consuming dedication to grove. Vocally, the rhythm and phrasing with which Erna delivers his lyrics is given as much importance as what it is he’s singing about. Behind him, the guitars, bass and drums find a deep pocket and lock in one instrument, often creating a riff out of little more than a one-chord syncopated pattern.

”We’re just a straightforward hard rock band,” says Rombola. “There’s nothing crazy, fancy or affected about our music. I play my guitar, our bassist plays his bass, our drummer plays his drums, our singer sings the songs. That’s all there is to it.

Rombola tends to oversimplify the case. In reality there has been some evolution in the Godsmack camp as of late, and it’s all there for the listening on Faceless. Many of the trackes, while still anchored in the band’s lurching, stop-start riffs and bottom-heavy thump, reveal a group finally venturing beyond its self-imposed boundaries. Some of these instances are subtle, like Rombola’s atonal “noise” guitar during the solo break in “Straight Out of Line,” and Erna’s layered vocal harmonies on the title track. Some are more drastic, like the acoustic guitars and orchestration that run through “Serenity.” Much of this growth can be attributed to the natural progression that comes from years of playing together. But for Godsmack, it’s also the direct result of a change in their writing and recording process. To create Faceless, Godsmack –four guys from four different backgrounds who came together on the cold, hard streets of Boston—decided to pack up, move to a beach house in Miami and live together.

”We wanted to get away from everything and focus 100 percent of our time and effort on the music, says Rombola. “Moving in together allowed us to get a lot closer to one another. We’re not a band that has spent years living in one place before we got signed, so this was the first time we did stuff like eat our meals together every day. And it was pretty cool. We didn’t kill one another, and everybody learned how to respect each other’s differences. It was a great experience.”

The four months in Miami also allowed the band to write at a relatively leisurely pace, something they didn’t have the opportunity to do for Awake. Prior to making that album, Godsmack toured practically nonstop to capitalize on the breakthrough success of their debut album and its hit singles, “Whatever,” “Keep Away” and “Voodoo.” As a result, the songs on Awake were written in whatever moments of downtime the group could grab—before shows in dressing rooms, after shows in hotels and during soundchecks.

Says Rombola, “When you write a song while you’re on the road, you throw it together at sound check and you go, ‘That’s pretty good…I think.’ And then after the record comes out you think, We should’ve done this, or We shouldn’t have done that. This time, though, we had so much time to write songs, to rehearse them and tweak them and say, ‘Maybe we should only do that once,’ or ‘Maybe we should have a double chorus there.’ We were able to think things through a little more.”

Says Erna,” We brought a little mini studio down to Florida with us. We would demo all the song ideas, burn some CD’s for everybody in the band and then go listen to them for a couple of days. After living with the songs for a while, you get a feel for whether or not things are jiving, or if you need to change a riff or vocal or drum part. You’re able to gain some perspective. That way, when you go into the studio, you’re that much more prepared.”

For all the changes made prior to the recording of Faceless, Rombola and Erna stuck with their tried-and-true gear setups when Godsmack entered Miami’s Hit Factory/Criteria Studios to make the record with producer David Bottrill (Tool, Mudvayne). Both employed the Mesa/Boogie Triple Rectifier amplifiers they used on Awake. Guitar-wise, Sully and Rombola—both inveterate Les Paul men—used two or three Standards and a couple of Customs, all with stock pickups and tuned to either dropped D (low to high D A D G B E) or dropped C (low to high (C B C F A D). The only other guitar used during the sessions was a Gibson Gothic Explorer, which makes an appearance on just one song. As for choosing which guitar to play on a specific track, Rombola says he and Sully didn’t discriminate: “We would grab whichever Les Paul had the freshest strings.”

As it happened, Erna plays more guitar on Faceless than he ever has in the past. The singer will often pick up a guitar onstage in order to beef up the rhythms behind Rombola’s solos but rarely plays much in the studio. This time, however, Erna contributed guitar to almost every tune on Faceless.

”The process usually began with Sully and I each recording a basic track, using similar setups and sounds,” says Rombola. “Sully had his rig—a Triple Rectifier with a couple of cabinets—in one room, and I was set up in another room. Then we would cut a third track using a [Mesa/Boogie Rectifier] recording preamp to get something of a different tone, maybe a little more midrangy and nasally, just to fill in the gap. And that would be played by whichever one of us felt like doing it. And that’s the rhythm sound on the record. That’s the way we did it on the last album as well, except I did the third track with a Fender Champ. But this time it was all Mesa.”

In addition to the Mesa/Boogies, both guitarists ran through an Ashly parametric EQ to help tighten up the low end, and used an assortment of Line 6 and Boss stompboxes. And Rombola, of course, always had his Dunlop Cry Baby close at hand: the pedal has assisted him on practically every Godsmack solo he’s ever played. “When I first joined this band,” he says, “the wah was one of the things that I incorporated into the songs that Sully really dug: he thought it brought a lot of life to the music. So he would get excited about it, and then I would, too. And it just snowballed from there, until it became something that I use all the time.

Although Rombola and Erna have used acoustic guitars when composing, Faceless is the group’s first record on which the instrument appears. Acoustic guitar can be heard on several album tracks, most notably “Serenity.” Described by Erna as “similar” to ‘Voodoo’ from the first record—very tribal and primitive,” the song is perhaps Godsmack’s most ambitious recording to date, featuring—in addition to six-and 12-string Ovation acoustics—timpani drums, tubular bells, a glockenspiel and a string section.

Its lyrics mark what is perhaps an even bigger departure for the group. Erna has always used his role as the voice of Godsmack as an outlet to vent the anger and frustration he’s experienced in his life. For the lyrics to “Serenity,” he drew inspiration from a very different place—namely, the life of one of his idols, Rush drummer Neil Peart, who a few years ago lost his daughter in a car accident and his wife to cancer. To help him cope with the tragedies, which occurred within 10 months of each other, Peart embarked on a 55,000-mile motorcycle journey throughout North America and Mexico, a trek that he chronicled in his book Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road.

Neil’s story affected me in a way that I couldn’t believe,” says Erna. “I already felt close to him from being a fan of his music all these years, and also because, since I started out as a drummer, I used to study his playing. Knowing that Neil was able to survive at a time when he was probably ready to put a noose around his neck made me realize that shit we complain about on a daily basis is so minuscule and irrelevant. It made me think about being more of a man and handling my problems a little better instead of complaining all the time.”

Which is not to say that Erna’s trademark vocal style—rage-filled, often combative lyrics delivered in a gruff, clipped voice—has been usurped in favor of a kinder gentler Sully. On the contrary, it’s still in fine form on Faceless songs like the title track and, not surprisingly, “I Fucking Hate You.”

”There’s always something that’ll piss you off, always somebody in your life that will stab you in the back and take advantage of you,” Erna says of the latter track, without revealing who is responsible for the song’s title. “That’s where those types of songs come in—it’s a way for me to get it out of my system without actually acting on those feelings.”

Throughout Faceless, Erna’s bark is matched by the rest of the band’s musical bite—Rombola’s thick power-chord slabs, Merrill’s guttural bass lines and, most notably, Larkin’s spirited and dynamic skin pounding. It’s clearly obvious that the addition of Larkin, who has manned the drum kit for, among others, Ugly Kid Joe and Amen, has invigorated Godsmack. Erna always knew Shannon would be a perfect fit for the band, and when original drummer Tommy Stewart left the fold early last year he wasted no time in going after Larkin.

”I’ve known Shannon since 1988,” says Erna, “and he was a big influence on my drum playing when I was younger. He was actually my first choice for Godsmack when we first started the band, but unfortunately he had just joined Amen two weeks prior to my phone call. So when Tommy left I figured I’d give him a call and, ironically, he had just quit Amen two weeks before. So it worked out perfectly.”

In a roundabout way, Erna even credits Larkin with indirectly helping to get Godsmack up and running. “Back in the early Nineties,” he says, “Shannon hooked me up with [Boston-based heavy metal band] Meliah Rage, who I wound up drumming for. [Although he never performed on any official Meliah Rage albums, a compilation of Sully’s 1992 demos with the band was recently released as Unfinished Business on Screaming Ferret Wrecords—GW Ed.] As a result of that gig I got referred to my next band, Strip Mind, with whom I signed my first deal with Warner Bros. Because of all the connections I made with that band, when I started up Godsmack we were able to get some good shows right off the band and play some better clubs than we normally would have so early in the game. So each little step along that path helped in the long run.”

”That turned out to be a great thing for us,” says Rombola. “The opportunity to do the Scorpion King soundtrack came up right as we had finished touring for Awake. We weren’t even thinking about writing songs, but we had the main verse riff to ‘I Stand Alone,’ which we always wanted to use. So we put it together. And it wound up doing better than any of our other singles before it! The song kept us alive at a time when we weren’t doing much. And now we’re coming right back out with a new record and we’re going to just keepi it moving. It’s like we never went away.”

Erna and Rombola also credit “I Stand Alone” with helping shape the new sound heard on Faceless. The song marked the first time Erna experimented with vocal harmonies, and it also included a middle section in which Rombola tried out some smoother, less distorted guitar tones.

”We’ve always had a pretty straightforward vibe, just completely balls-out,” says Rombola, “so that middle section was a different sound for us. And the vocals were a little more sophisticated as well. I just think in general it was a special song. And I think we have more of those special moments on this new record.”

”The song really tapped into something new for us, and we’ve continued to build off of that,” says Erna. “It’s a relief to listen to this new record and hear that it doesn’t sound like the first two. And man, I know everyone says they love their new album and it’s the best shit they’ve ever written, but I really feel deep in my heart that we’ve got something unique here. I think this album is definitely gonna separate us from anybody who ever thought we sound like someone else. There’s nobody doing what we’re doing right now. There are a lot of groups that are supposedly considered rock bands that I don’t think…I don’t know if people really remember what rock is. I mean, there’s a lot of rap rock and techno rock, nu-metal and stuff like that out there, but we’re not any of that. This record will prove that we’re our own thing. We’re…”

Once again Erna pauses, searching for the exact words to get his point across. I take it upon myself to offer his own phrase –“energy rock”—back to him.