Following the tour for 1984’s Thunder Seven, Triumph finally issued a live album. This set, compiled from several different tours, more or less plays as a “greatest hits” and most of them are here. These performances, laid out without the benefit of extra studio layers, reveals Triumph to be one hell of a live band.
When I was in high school this was my go-to tape to slap into the Walkman while I mowed the lawn. If the mower didn’t break, or there were no distractions, it would take exactly the time of this album to get that chore done. I would daydream of playing big shows and wonder why Triumph weren’t a bigger band, and that made it bearable (maybe even fun). Even after my musical tastes moved far away from this sort of thing, I still would rock out to Stages every time. And, 35 years later, it still kicks ass.
This set concludes, as they often do, with two new studio tracks - “Mind Games” and “Empty Inside”. These reveal a shift in direction that included (in the case of “Mind Games”) multiple songwriters, lots of keyboards, and a sound that was a bit too close to all the other radio bands of the time. There is, however, a lot of Pink Floyd in Rik Emmett’s “Empty Inside”, which is very cool (but also very un-Triumphlike). These changes would become more apparent on 1986’s The Sport Of Kings (and conclude the following year on Surveillance”). While those albums had plenty of highlights, and their own charm, this is the point where the band’s classic era concludes which makes Stages the perfect summation of Triumph’s career.
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