Album Review: Massive Wagons - “Triggered”

 

There are some bands where the sight of some new music from them landing in your inbox gives your soul and spirit a much needed lift and a big grin to spread across your gob. And then there’s bands like Massive Wagons where the appearance of a new album has the effect of making your heart sink and cause a general grimacing feeling of “well go on then, let’s give ‘em another chance, who knows, maybe this one’ll surprise us.” The harsh truth is though that in well over a decade of output, the Morecambe rockers have only really managed one album, 2018's Full Nelson, that could honestly be described as being above average and the fact that they followed that with 2020's decidedly underwhelming House Of Noise suggested that the opportunity for this band to really make their mark as the bright hopes of Britrock that some were touting them as had been and gone.

For what it's worth though, Triggered is at least a step back in the right direction. Oddly, the group that Massive Wagons remind me of more than anything on this is late '90s Britrockers A - lead singer Baz has refined his voice to a sort of higher-end half-sneer-half-snarl that's reminiscent of A's Jason Perry and, quite surprisingly, it actually works with songs like Please Stay Calm showing a new found ear for restraint and melody that in this reviewer's opinion, puts them up there with ver Wagons' strongest stuff so far while Generation Prime (featuring Benji from Skindred/Dub War on backing vocals - talk about yer unexpected collaborations) and the self-explanatory A.S.S.H.O.L.E. shows that the group's sense of humour which has come across as a bit cringy in the past, has at least been refined a bit to an enjoyably sharp and vicious jab (again, comparisons could be made to A's Old Folks or similar). The low-slung boogie of the title track and the keyboard warrior bashing No Friend Of Mine show the group backing their Terrorvision style humour up with the riffs and the tunes to finally stop sounding like a poor man's version of Tony Wright and co.

They're a little bit undone elsewhere by their reluctance to let go of their Quo-style straight-up-rock security blanket which, in truth, was always this lot's weakness and the fact that, at 13 tracks, this album could arguably have had a one or two of the lesser tunes lopped off it without anyone really missing them but at least Triggered is arguably Massive Wagons' strongest effort to date, moving their sound forward a bit, prioritising the tunes a bit more over the wilful daftness and puts some much-needed clear water between them and the idea-free NWOCR dullards sinking into a joyless morass of over-studied riffs. Who knows, we might yet make rock gods out of 'em...

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