In 2013, when this excellent album first appeared, it’s progenitors Trouble stood at a potentially career-defining crossroads; on a double-rebound after losing the man around whom they’d forged their sound, vocalist Eric Wagner, and still reeling from the after-effects of an ill-starred assignation with Warrior Soul‘s Kory Clarke, the band turned to Exhorder/Floodgate vocalist Kyle Thomas, who had helped the band out in a live situation before and who they knew to possess a safer pair of hands than Clarke, if you see what I mean.

The resultant album, The Distortion Field, is, to my fevered mind at least, an absolute stormer. Thomas is an amazingly versatile vocalist, possessing the sort of skills that enabled the band’s guiding hands Rick Wartell and Bruce Franklin to keep enough of the ‘old’ Trouble whilst also allowing them to stretch out in heavier, more intense directions too. The resultant mashup is pure ambrosia for the ears, an album that sees the band standing tall and forging ahead when they could easily have crumbled and given the game away.

This is still doom, of course – there’s even a track called Hunters of Doom to remind absent-minded listeners of the fact – but it’s heavier, rawer doom; and when the band feed in the stoner element – Glass of Lies is a nice example – it’s jauntier, groovier stoner rock, almost Southern in feel, with a sense that the rest of the band feel truly liberated and invigorated by Thomas’s injection of vitality. There’s real flair here, a mercurial air that sees the band in the sort of confident mood in which magic can be made.

At it’s most stately, on The Broken Have Spoken or Sink or Swim, Thomas really stretches out, suffusing his vocals with enough of a classic Dio feel to stamp the material with real authority. At it’s most ‘Trouble’, on Sucker, the band simply reel in the years and go for broke in spine tingling fashion.

If there’s one minor quibble it’s that at fourteen tracks and over an hour in duration this is a lot of Trouble to absorb in one sitting, but that aside, if you never bothered with this first time around because it was Wagner-free, or if you’ve simply just never heard Trouble at all, give this a spin – you might be pleasantly surprised!

The Distortion Field re-releases on October 14th.