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Trouble (Metal)
Biography
At a time when heavy metal was moving forward faster than ever, thanks to the advent and growing popularity of thrash metal, Chicago's Trouble embodied a nostalgic throwback to the genre's old-school, '70s values -- and specifically a preference for the deliberate, slow-creeping style of the genre's founding fathers, Black Sabbath, which, in the able hands of Trouble and California's similarly backward-gazing Saint Vitus, came to be known as doom metal. Unfortunately, neither band, nor their few lesser-known colleagues (the Obsessed, Pentagram, etc.), ever achieved any commercial success to speak of, but their preservation efforts nevertheless rescued metal's original blueprint from disuse, and carved it in granite for subsequent exploration by each new generation of doom bands that followed.

Trouble's unorthodox career path began to unfold in 1979, and after years of painstaking rehearsals, club gigs, and tooling with their sound, vocalist Eric Wagner, guitarists Bruce Franklin and Rick Wartell, bassist Sean McAllister, and drummer Jeff Olson came to the attention of Metal Blade Records, which issued their surprisingly mature eponymous debut in 1984. Also referred to in years to come as Psalm 9 -- because of its namesake-explaining quotation from scripture: "The Lord will be a refuge for the oppressed; a refuge in times of trouble" -- the album revealed not only the quintet's strong ties to heavy metal's '70s aesthetics, but also their Christian beliefs (almost unheard of in the metal world), which quickly earned them the additional label of "white metal.
Selected Discography
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