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Trouble - "Trouble" (1990, Def American) [key tracks: The Wolf, Black Shapes of Doom]

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"Alone in the universe, seems our lives are cursed. See where eyes cannot follow and believing there is Tomorrow...it's here. It's here now."

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Matt may have asked for DA or Tom Petty, but he gets this. Love it or leave it. What can I say, I am glad to be back posting! The new format will be less wordy than ever before! I will try to have a "fun" paragraph (like this one), a paragraph about the album, and a paragraph long blog entry. I am hoping every post will be no longer than 3 paragraphs. So before I start the fourth or fifth incarnation of Bubblegoose blogging, welcome back! Hi Matt, hi Mark, hi Rich, hi Tahisha, and hi everyone else... I missed you all. And we begin...

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This is the LP that should have blown up for Chicago's own Trouble. They went from heavy doom metal in the early 80's to this... smart, soulful, psychedelic metal. In an era still buzzing from the high of G'n'F'n'R, and before Metallica totally sold out with the "black" album (groan), this LP should have been pounding from the rooms of every teenager in the midwest. Hell, it was even produced by Rick Rubin for Def American (the "it" label of the times). Instead, the 90's brought us the musical inquisition... all metal was murdered or forced underground. More appropriately, it was the metal Diaspora, fragmenting and flinging metal in several fractured directions. But we got a lot of bad pop rap, pop grunge, and pop alternative in its place... yuck. Long live Eric Wagner's ghastly vocals, and long live Bruce Franklin's downright evil mixture of shred and doom guitar riffage!

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Okay, so today I saw a sight for sore eyes. It's what I can only refer to as "Council Bluffs Garland." In the days before digital won every format war, we used to have these things called "cassette tapes." All over town broken tapes would be discarded into the street, eventually to be broken and have their sensitive magnetic entrails strewn about. If the sun and wind conspired just so, this analog crime scene would glitter and sparkle like any diamond sold at Sol's Pawn. That is, sparkle only until the inevitable filth and Loess Hills dirt collected and choked all beauty out of everything in west-end Kanesville. It was a shock to see CB Garland today, as I haven't seen a cassette tape for months. God bless CB!

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