Liverpool Sound and Vision * * * *
It starts with a hint of menace, gathers pace and ends up being a set of four songs that have the destructive power of a cyclone in mid-flow; the early days of Iron Maiden at the Ruskin Arms are not lost upon the listener as they take in Liverpool’s Black Neon Knights.
Whilst Liverpool doesn’t have the name for excess of the crashing cymbals and guitars that scream like a supersonic aircraft scorching through the wind and setting fire to the tails of demons and angels rock that cities such as Birmingham and London has. Occasionally, sporadically, a band will come forth like the young peasant boy Arthur, take hold of what no others can from the rock and become legendary. Whilst legendary might be too strong a word for any band to bare, perhaps even Paul McCartney might baulk in private at The Beatles being called so, there comes a time when someone/ some group or artist has to have attached to their name and who knows in 30 years given the right set of circumstances why not a band that creates riffs on their E.P. Dawn of the Knight that explode like a star being born out of blackness and whose light resonates across the heavens.
Not that you should build someone up either if they don’t deserve it, too many times a person or group can be seen on television or in the arts pages of some well-worn magazine being hailed as the next best thing; so many next best things that there somewhere must be an ever-increasing line of bodies ready to grasp with one hand tied fruitlessly behind their back their five minutes of fame and ready-made sponsorship endorsement. However when a band takes on the unexpected in an area not known for its immediate love affair with the genre, then the praise is wholesome and brings back a sense of longing for a time when N.W.O.B.H.M. took great strides to kill off the nation’s love affair with Disco and Punk.
Gareth Morris, Paul Anthony Naylor, Martin Hensman and Geoff Mulligan fulfil the desire of memory, of the chance that some people in a certain age bracket would have died to have taken part in and in the tracks, Loaded Gun, Burn It Down, the superb Walk Away and Take It Back, the four young men, fuelled with passion and an abundance of guitar driven testosterone, Black Neon Knights let you dream once more of having fronted a group of note and thrilling an audience to their very core.
It has to be said without shame and in a voice of the saintly Brian Blessed, that this is great stuff, raw, intelligent and down-right loud. Really great stuff!
Ian D. Hall