Trouble is a band that I have a very long relationship with, well over thirty-five years and counting (I have tickets to their 2022 Glasgow show pinned to a board in my living room, even though I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get the time off work to attend), but have only seen live a couple of times due to their comparatively rare forays to the UK which themselves didn’t always intersect with my ability to get to the gigs. When I first heard them, it was as a teenager, and with thrash in its early ascendancy I wanted all my metal speedy; however, the twin guitar harmonies of Bruce Franklin and Rick Wartell still grabbed me, whilst the slow, enunciated vocals of Eric Wagner were a plaintive alternative to the breakneck delivery of my normal musical fare. With label and personnel issues, their releases were all too few and far between, and like most fans I missed out on the limited-edition tour only 1994 release of ‘One For The Road’, and with the recent loss to music of Eric Wagner, this apparently coincidental re-issue is ever more poignant.
Fans of the band will recognise tracks from the ‘One For The Road’ EP from later LPs (‘Requiem’ and ‘Another Day’ appearing on ‘Green Plastic Head’, whilst ‘Goin’ Home’ appeared much later on ‘Simple Mind Condition’), but this release is well worth buying either as a completist fan or just somebody wanting to have a sampler of Trouble at their creative height. ‘Goin’ Home’ is laden with masterful guitar hooks that raised a stiff middle finger to the lazy grunge playing that was prevalent at the time, contemporary magazines like Kerrang and Metal Hammer eschewing the denim and leather cover stars of yore and replacing them with assorted bored looking wearers of baggy jumpers and chequered shirts. ‘Window Pain’ punches forth a fist in your face riff that grabs the neck and shakes it, whilst ‘Requiem’ is far slower and more reflective, the instrumentation skirting dangerously close to the territory of the power ballad, but reined back from that saccharine abyss by the haunting delivery of Mr Wagner’s vocals, etched through as they are with more genuine emotion and intelligence than any of the Bon Jovian cliches of their contemporaries. ‘Another Day’ screams with the pomp of Sabbath worship without being derivative or sounding like an impersonation, whilst the almost indecently short sub three minute ‘Doom Box’ allows Eric Wagner to demonstrate a swaggering sneer to his vocals, a sound that propelled Axl Rose to unprecedented fame and success. EPs can be hit and miss, especially as this was produced at a time of upheaval, but each track is a triumph, and the CD demands the replay button to be hit again and again.
After the above, ‘Unplugged’ is practically a bonus, and indeed advertised on the blurb that came with my copy as an “extra”, albeit one that clocks in at almost double the length of the main content. To fully appreciate the release does require a bit of knowledge of the context of its genesis, and the era it came from, an era before mobile phones that were anything but phones, and when the internet was in its infancy and limited to links between universities and other academic institutions. From the late 80’s to late 90’s ‘MTV Unplugged’ was a flagship program, attracting numerous bands to the studio, and leading to assorted multi-million selling albums. Sadly, Trouble were never the unit shifting act they deserved to be to appear on that show, and this release coincided with the final demise of the ‘Unplugged’ brand in 2009, when MTV, an initialism for “Music TeleVision” stopped playing music and moved to reality shows. What it is, however, is an interesting adjunct to Trouble’s album releases, a somewhat bizarre mishmash of sounds, not all of which are the stripped back acoustic pieces you might expect of an “unplugged” recording (check out the blast of ‘Waiting for the Sun’, which definitely has a Doors vibe well beyond the borrowing of a title), the CD instead meandering from the psychedelic to the simply interesting for the dedicated fan.
When ‘One For The Road/Unplugged’ arrived on my door mat, I at first feared it was a cynical cash in on the death of Eric Wagner. However, some empirical analysis shows that this would be a simple coincidence. Hell, if the label wanted to cash in, the booklet would be laden with dedications to him, something that is absent. What this is instead is an interesting snapshot in time of a band that should have been so much more successful, and is an essential purchase for fans of both Trouble, and indeed The Skull, a band that will need no explanation to those who are aware of the former. I can only hope after all the contractual and managerial convolutions that have seemed to have befallen the band, if this sells as well as it deserves to, some of the profits will go back to the artists and their dependants.
(8.5/10 Spenny)
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