photo courtesy of Pavement Entertainment

Album Review of The Outfit: Go (Pavement Entertainment)

The Outfit‘s Go is one helluvan AOR album. Guitar-driven rock with intricate musicianship, a big, arena-filling sound, and hooks catchy enough to have made several songs hits during the genre’s heyday. Instead, The Outfit will have to settle for being a favorite new discovery of guitar rock fans, however they might discover new music. (Hopefully, a few of you discover new music here at the Blog.)

Actually, fans who follow current rock music closely may have already discovered The Outfit. The band’s self-titled debut album in 2018 spawned the song “Soldier Boy,” which received rock radio airplay and reached #34 on Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock Radio chart. A second album, Viking, followed in 2020, with the video for that album’s title track racking up 380,000 views on YouTube. So yeah, maybe I’m the one who’s late to the party, after the decent success The Outfit found with its first two albums. Go, The Outfit’s third album, the one that gained my attention (because it was sent to me for review consideration, and it’s a friggin’ rock masterpiece) was released last year.

image courtesy of Pavement Entertainment

The Outfit is mainly a classic-styled rock band, but some of their most engaging songs are unique originals in which the band takes a big swing and hits it out of the park. “Arrival of Jane,” for example, has a big, open, progressive rock feeling, a sci-fi-related theme, booming drums, and soaring guitars. It’s the sort of thing some ambitious bands were able to succeed with in the ’70s or ’80s but not so much since. That’s the second track on Go, following album-opener “Monster,” which introduces The Outfit fittingly as a power rock band, perhaps hinting at some later variety via guitar runs that spin forth from the pounding, heavy rhythm.

The third track, “Big Eyes,” is another favorite and perhaps the uptempo song with the most crossover hit possibility in this collection, at least across fans of various guitar-driven rock subgenres. The heavy music bed and screaming guitars part periodically for the fun-to-sing-along with “hey, hey, hey, big eyes seem to follow you; hey, hey, hey, big eyes seem to haunt you.”

Of course, “Mountain,” a rock ballad, has this record’s most crossover appeal, with the ability to reach beyond guitar rock fans, as slow rock songs more often reach the broadest audiences.

The first of two very British, punk-recalling rockers, “Elo Kiddies,” is up next. (That song title would be pronounced “ello, kiddies!”) This sort of irreverent attitude won’t be found again until the last song on the record, The Outfit’s raucous cover of “God Save the Queen.”

“Go” marks the return of smoothly heavy rock, a full-tilt, energy rocker driven by its powerful rhythm section and the repeated, singalongable lyric “If she won’t go, I will go.” “Fire Eye” follows, with a heavy thumping rhythm and vocal delivery that recalls “Arrival of Jane,” with an almost haunting vocal delivery transitioning to a brightly engaging chorus.

The album’s penultimate track, “You Say,” is probably my favorite song on the back half of the disc – though it’s close. This song is built on a steady rock rhythm with one of those attention-grabbing, stop-and-go-boom pauses between the verse and the chorus. It’s actually the last track performed in the predominant style found throughout Go; as I noted above, the disc closes with “God Save the Queen,” which really is a fun way to close the record.

Looking Ahead

As the band notes in this Facebook post, there’s a new record on the way. I can’t wait to hear it! This post gives a release date of March 14th for the new album’s first single, “Hard On Me.” You can pre-save at this link (or click through to view, post-release).