The Moshville Times - Album Review: Monster Truck

Few bands do hairy, sweaty, riff-fuelled hard rock better than Monster Truck. In fact, now that we’re on album four from the Canadians, it’s more like them descending from the mountain to impart a lesson on how to do it before the travel across the globe, plying their newest wares along with the best of their past works.

Warriors has captured Monster Truck on the best form of their life. Whilst they’ve yet to turn in a bad album, this is their best album since their debut. In fact, they likely could have gotten away with calling this Furiosity II. They may be a band who know exactly what they are but they’ve always played with the formula just enough to stay true to themselves whilst ensuring they don’t make the same album twice, much like Clutch. Really, this album just picks up where the debut left off, albeit dialled up to the proverbial eleven.

Packed full to the brim with riffs, fuzz, choruses for audiences to sing/shout/chant, “Warriors” charges out of the gate to kick the album off in style, showing nothing has changed in their world, other than they’ve refined their sound to its highest peak yet. As it makes you want to grab the nearest air guitar yet simultaneously bounce until you’ve nothing left, this is them saying “We’re back, motherfuckers!” Suitably-named “Fuzz Mountain”’s power lies in its own bouncy chorus loaded with vocables for the live environment and a massive, chugging riff which is overflowing with fuzz and the heft of a, well, monster truck. Meanwhile, “Golden Woman” is essentially the band on enough speed to even make Lemmy have second thoughts.

Whilst the majority of the album is the band showing their admiration for the art of the riff and firing out the tightest album they possibly could, they still manage to find time to bend their own rules, namely in the doom-ridden ”Live Free” and the Southern twangs of “Country Livin’”. Where the former is essentially just an experiment of what would happen if they made their sludgiest song possible, it’s the latter where it gets interesting. Monster Truck aren’t a band who deal in ballads and this is as close as it gets to them dropping a gear on this album. It allows them to reset after some of their ballsiest numbers to date precedes this for a welcome breather without killing the momentum and that’s even taking into consideration that it’s the only song which crosses the 4-minute threshold.

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Where the band have always thrived best is their punchy, no-nonsense attitude to writing songs. With a handful of songs not even hitting the 3-minute mark and the rest, save for the afore-mentioned “Country Livin’”, all barely over that mark, they make the most of what they have. As they jam in as much as possible without being ham-fisted about it, they manage to do more in three minutes than most bands do in double that time. It’s reflective of the album as a full piece, too where you feel you’ve went twelve rounds with the band (albeit enjoying it) and it leaves you breathless. Yet it doesn’t even need to ask you to come back for more because you invariably will.

It’s becoming more prevalent in today’s scene where bands are making albums where the entirety of the album could work in the live environment. Certainly, if Monster Truck tried it on their upcoming UK tour, there would still be more than enough time to fit in all the favourites from the past three albums. “Wild Man” acts as a great ace in the whole and its double time sequence at the end is one of those rare songs which is perfect to both open and close a live set. The stomp of “Still Got Fire” drips with fuzz as it mingles with grizzled vocals as it ascends to its crescendo, ending in a fashion where you expect another song to follow but the closest you’ll get is listening to the album again. And again. And basically thankful the age of streaming means you won’t wear out your vinyl/tape/CD.

Monster Truck have always created a sound worthy of their name. Indeed, if there was any band worthy of inheriting Motörhead’s crown of intense, uncompromising but straight forward rock, it would be Monster Truck. Warriors feels like the album the band have always had in their head as their ultimate goal – them distilled to their purest and rawest.

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Warriors is out now

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