Triumph: Allied Forces

Artist: Triumph

Album: Allied Forces

Year released: 1981 Purchased by me 1983 on cassette and in 1991 or 1992 on CD.

There is a lot of emotional and personal historic ground related to this album. In 1982, MTV was picked up by my local cable company and Triumph was in regular rotation those days. The first video of theirs that caught my eyes/ears was “Say Goodbye”. The video is pretty dated looking, like 99% of all videos 2 years after their initial release date, but does feature Rik Emmett playing a double neck guitar. Chances are very good Rik did this in homage to one of his heroes, Jimmy Page.  I always wanted a T-Shirt with the album cover on it. If ever I saw someone in public wearing one my eyes would bug out and I would think there was nothing cooler.

This disc really brings me back to my pre-teen years. It’s all about being young wild and free. In 1982 I was going into the 6^th grade at Wheeler Elementary in Speedway, Indiana. My musical seeds were really planted by this disc. I imagined that in an alternate universe *I* wrote and played these songs, not Triumph. I don’t think I had made the connection that I could possibly play guitar myself and write songs at that age. So I did the next best thing and started visualizing myself in a fictitious band in a fake universe that played songs that existed in this real world.

Allied Forces also was a huge bonding agent between me and my cousin Patrick who is the same age as me. We were both huge Rush and Triumph fans in our younger days. His tastes and musical direction has changed but mine has stayed pretty constant over the decades.  Triumph was never really a ‘hip’ band amongst my peer group growing up, so having a fellow Triumph fan in my cousin Patrick was beyond cool to me.

The good times playing Atari 2600 friends or my cousins is what this disc is about to me. Which brings up an important question: How does it hold up musically? I’d say in this decade pretty well. Other than a couple of outdated slang expressions, (“Hey mama, say what you wanna” in Fool For You Love comes to mind) it holds up pretty well. It features a timeless “Gibson through Marshall sound”, although I suspect a lot of the guitar parts were played with Framus Akkerman or Dean guitar. All of the drums are acoustic drums with no machines or samples and the bass playing is solid. There are also hints of early guitar synth and a Hammond B3 as well, but both are used sparingly.

One last aside about this disc. I remember getting on cassette as a prize from my employer, the Indianapolis Star, for selling a couple new newspaper subscriptions.