Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
There are some things in life that should come with a cautionary sign attached them. Not the dangerous ones in which various pictures are plastered over the front of packaging and perforated with Government Surgeon General advice, not the kind in which Tipper Gore managed to spring load and foster fear over the corruption of young American minds and not the imaginary ones that should be written in paint over the front of polling stations which proclaim the words, Governments can seriously cause you stress but the ones that state loud and proud, “This C.D. will change the way you look at local music” or “Stop watching television, get out there and listen to this band, they will make you smile harder than rhinoceros armed with a gun and a poacher cowering on its knees.”
For Black Diamond, this group of young musicians from Liverpool, that type of alert would be just the start, for in their release, cunningly titled THE EP, what comes screaming out, above the sound of a lead singer giving the same type of performance as he does live, through the explosion of gracious noise in which rampaging dinosaurs would be looking out for the predator that is about to devour them, the sound kicks the backside of the ill-informed, the unadvised and posts a warning in big capital letters, the British metal scene of the 20th Century is dead, NWOBHM has croaked its last, now comes the new breed.
THE EP is a moment in time in which older fans of the genre will search back through the minds and remember when Iron Maiden burst out on to the scene and finally out of The Rainbow, when Saxon and Nazareth stormed all over the locality and the promise, an oath, was undertaken that music would be played loud and live. Songs such as Bated Breath, the outstanding Down In Flames, the assurance of Take Me and Left To Die Alone make a mockery of the young age that encompasses the group and shows that in the course of life those with the biggest desire and fortitude are those that are willing to make a stand against banality, the trivial and the dull.
Black Diamond are something special, whether live or in the studio, the four young men kick out so hard that those sensory inputs called ears will only ever thank you for the bruising they are about to enjoy.
Ian D. Hall