PROGRESSIONS OF POWER

With this prophetic title , Triumph went on a step further in moving away from the prog material they had developed in their first two albums , so it is logical that for the average progheads , these albums are of lesser interest. The turn they chose to take is towards polished metal FM rock and they will sound more and more like other bands of the era although retaining a certain typical feel of theirs. The text are still faithful to what they sang from the start (Live For The WE , Tear The Roof Off, Woman In Love etc...) , with only the closers on each side ( In The Night and Hard Road) of the vinyl catching your progressive mind but even then not managing to keep it for long. The now-obligatory guitar interlude is still of an interest. An average album defining the new Triumph, but you might want to let it rest in case you do not have it yet in your proghead collection.

Triumph's straightforward & sophisticated hard rock'n roll sound is very deja vu, but they are original when they add some progressive related elements: unfortunately, except some good acoustic guitar intros, this record sounds too much like most of the popular American hard rock bands like Shooting Star or Boston, for instance. The sound is a bit amateurish, which may be annoying since the tracks are not extremely elaborated. This good album is fairly enjoyable but certainly not a memorable one. Triumph did quite better.

Rating: 3.5 stars

It's a first Triumph album I got many years ago. I didn't know nothing about that band before and even after firs listening I was attracted their melodic hard-rock.

Later I realized, that in fact they are kind of Rush-clone with less technical music and more AOR-oriented sound. I have listened 2-3 more their different albums, to be honest - without big success. But "Progressions of Power " stayied in my memory as their most attractive album.

Main impression after listening - there are some very good songs and some very bad songs. Because of that album in total sounds as unsuccessful compilation. I think, if there are some good Triumph compilation album, it should be the best decision for anyone interested in their music.

All in all, not bad band with some bright moments and some simple faceless hard-rock clones, but in both cases main problem is lack of originality.

Neither very 'progressive' nor particularly 'powerful'!

After the very straightforward and generic 1979 album Just A Game - that I consider the band's weakest ever achievement - Triumph could hardly sink any lower. With Progressions Of Power the band plays it rather safe and overall they do not evolve or push many musical boundaries. 'Progressions Of Power' is thus an extremely misleading title as the band hardly progressed at all from their last album. Generic party hard rockers like I Live For The Weekend, I Can Survive and Tear The Roof Off follows the pattern of the awful American Girls from the last album.

However, there are some signs of what was to come on some later, more musically successful, albums. The Bluesy (semi-)ballad In The Night features a strong vocal performance and some tasteful acoustic guitar licks, but it is certainly not progressive in any reasonable understanding of that term. Nature's Child has a somewhat heavier sound than we are used to from Triumph and features a slightly Black Sabbath-like riff (however, Black Sabbath never made anything as trite as this not even on Technical Ecstacy or Never Say Die). The best song of this album is clearly the Spanish flavoured Fingertalkin'/Hard Road which reminds slightly of the excellent Flamenco inspired band Carmen, particularly their third album (which is the least good of Carmen's three albums).

My version of this album has a different running order compared to what is listed here, but it has the same songs. The production is not quite as it should be and the sound is slightly muddy compared to both earlier and later albums. This fact leaves me no other alternative than to give this the same rating as Just A Game even though this album is a slight improvement in musical terms. Despite one good number (Fingertalkin'/Hard Road) and a couple of decent ones, this is not really recommended unless you are a Triumph fan. Triumph never made a great album, but they sure made better albums than this!

Funny, my LP/CD collection is over 4000. And thats just the "good stuff" that I've kept. The reason I say "funny" is that Triumph is hardly a favorite band of mine. So why am I bothering to review this album when I've only reviewed like 5 other albums? Well I just happened across them in Prog Archives and notices what a low review this album is getting. I just felt like defending the little bugger is all, since its being unfairly attacks. Things like calling their music "generic party rockers" is just unfair. You could use that line on 90% of 70s/80s hard rock. The real question is, are they good or bad party rockers? And these are very good.

Does the band deserve to be considered Prog? No. They had a few extended songs that sort of qualify, but they're not Prog. But as hard rock goes, they were kick ass. In the late 70s we had a real dry spell with a lot of early 70s hard rock bands dying off, and the metal 80s were still to come. Bands like Triumph sort of tightened up the blooze of early 70s hard rock into a very modern sound for people like me that liked hard/metal Rock n Roll. This stuff "swings" more than Rush, and made a lot of Zep and Deep Purple fans like my pretty happy. I always Progressions of Power was their best; where the songwriting and performances came together to make for a real solid hard rock album. It deserves better than the low reviews its getting here.

(now I need to get around to reviewing some PFM, Can, Faust, Gong, Caravan, etc)