Triumph: Just A Game (1979)

 For their first album specifically recorded for RCA, Triumph delivered a concept album about - you guessed it - a rock & roll band on the road and all the pitfalls and hurdles that come with it. The album sleeve even features a board game about being a band on the road (oh the number of stoned hours spent playing that game back in the day 😂). 

This album saw the band’s songwriting jump several levels and, in “Hold On” and “Lay It On The Line”, Triumph got two of its biggest and most enduring hits (there is no classic rock station in all of Canada that does not play both of those songs at least once a day). The epic title track, which kicks off side two, is one of Rik Emmett’s greatest works (and my favorite Triumph song ever), and his “Suitcase Blues”, which closes out the album, sums up the album’s theme perfectly. As with most of their albums, he gets in a solo track and here we have “Fantasy Serenade”. As always, it is an absolutely lovely, classically-styled guitar piece that shows him off to be the master guitarist that he is. However, as is mostly the case, it is totally unnecessary and disrupts the flow of what is otherwise a really solid band project (I’ll shut up now). 

Gil Moore’s voice is less represented on this album but when it does appear, he really makes the most of it. The opening “Movin’ On” is a pretty killer way to kick things off but it’s the dark, dynamic swing of “Young Enough To Cry” that is one of his greatest vocal performances. However, he is also responsible for “American Girls”, which closes out side one and is just insipid (it has a killer singalong chorus but it could have been written by a ten year old….that happened sometimes with Gil’s songs). 

Triumph took a detour away from the concepts after this album (for a while at least), which is just as well. This album will always be my favorite.