Source: Album Artwork
Whether or not you enjoy re-releases of old albums very much depends on your tastes. On the one hand, it can be an exciting snapshot of a time sometimes before you were even born, and a chance to connect with music that you never got a chance to in the past. On the other hand, it can sometimes feel a bit like a corny marketing ploy, an attempt to get people to listen to and fork out money to a band that no one cared about back then but because they were around back then they must be good right?
Leaving that aside for a second, let’s just look (as it were) at the sound of Stormtrooper’s Pride Before A Fall (The Lost Album). Imagine the vocals of Iron Maiden put over the sound of things like Led Zepplin and Deep Purple, with the speed and drive of Maiden in the rhythm section especially and the interesting little synth flourishes and quirky extra-musical additions of Zepplin and Deep Purple thrown in for good measure. Again, depending on your musical tastes you will either love the sound of those things or have just scrunched your face up like the drawstrings of a duffle bag.
It would be cruel, bordering on impossibly so, to fault this album for sounding dated. After all, that is really the point of it – thankfully the production isn’t as scratchy as we were perhaps expecting.
Pride Before A Fall is a “cool” listen. It is cool to hear “lost” tracks from a band from ages past that never really got the break that perhaps they should. However it does smack somewhat of narcissism to assume that people want to hear these tracks from a band that never really made it from Bristol in the 1970s; why should anyone now really care when people who were around at the time didn’t? If they had then Stormtrooper would be a household name in 2016.
But as a one-off snapshot of musical history, and as a tribute to a band who Lady Luck missed a trick with, Pride Before A Fall is well worth giving a spin.
