It is kind of confusing how this album came up. I will explain the reasons below. What matters now is that I hold a beautifully packaged album full of TROUBLE's haunting melodies, but in a not so regular form. Many were filled with doubts about how this album would sound, I was damn sure that it would be a classic TROUBLE masterpiece right from the start.

The US doomsters (later kind of Stoner dudes) have a long running history full of magnificent albums that influenced many bands in the Metal genre, bands that are now featured in many well known magazines. Anyway, this album marks the end of the Eric Wagner era, being his last release with TROUBLE since he left to be replaced by WARRIOR SOUL/DIRTY RIG frontman Kory Clarke.

I said that this was a kind of confusing release because some of these songs were released as an acoustic EP back in late 2007, an EP which was distributed only by the band. Now, with the help of SAOL the band kind of re-releases the songs in a full-length album that features four previously unreleased tracks.

Many people were wondering about the quality of this album. Since I want to clear any cloud of doubt I have to tell you... This is a hell of a beautifully depressing release by the Chicago legends! The doomy and melancholic melodies produced by these gentlemen without Franklin's Gibson are really mind blowing. Wagner adds one more astonishing performance to his biography and makes us scream even harder that we want him back to TROUBLE! Regarding the four unreleased tracks, well Mythic Hero is a beautiful song written about Jim Morrison, Waiting For The Sun is a psychedelic ballad with this weird TROUBLE vibe, Fly is a mellower psychedelic side of TROUBLE and Heartful Of Soul is as they say a down-tuned, crunched-up version of the classic YARDBIRDS song. Since this kind of music speaks for itself, I will stop here and end this review with just writing down Wagner's words...

Heaviness is not only the tones of the guitars or the pounding of drums, but the chords and progressions that can be arranged in a song to create a mood, and that mood is, in most TROUBLE songs, unhappy.