Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Life is not quite a race against time, the hours will go past at their usual speed and the clock will recognise every hour with its usual exuberance and maddening, almost happy like sophistication. It is the time you cannot see, the tick between tock that you have to use wisely and gain the spirit and wherewithal to make a difference to life and to the quality of your performance.
For Diamond Days the clock isn’t racing against them, they have a natural talent that can sweep up all before them and in a venue, in a city that isn’t a natural home for the heavier, more outlandish and in some cases more truthful art form, the members of Diamond Days bought their set to the front of an audience that had been blown of their weekday hinges and would continue to see the undoing of the nuts and bolts of established thought all night.
Just down the road from Studio 2, the clubs and bars that surround the section of town, where the hair gets loose and the party spirit hits the streets night after night, Metal would be a by word for misunderstanding, some of the patrons openly dismissing it as a way of life and claiming it not to be relevant, inside Studio 2, a not so quiet revolution was going on and aided by the music of Diamond Days.
The band have a way to go but that is all part of the ride, part of the process that marks the genre out as being an art form for which far too long now has been in a state of doldrums, especially in the United States and the U.K., the two natural homes of the movement, it has allowed tremendous and unrelentingly good groups from the Nordic north to become the new Godfathers of Metal, bands from the unlikeliest countries of France, Spain, Poland and beyond to overtake the British contingent, at least in its mainstream output, to pull ahead and speed off into the sunset, leaving British Metal lagging behind.
In Diamond Days there is a possible future, an existence for the new generation to come along and place the U.K. Metal scene into a much higher gear and cause the same sensation that N.W.O.B.H.M did in the 70s and 80s. The band just need to crank up the style a notch and retain the don’t give a monkeys outlook whilst inside bursting with pride at being able to have the power to look between the tick and the tock and see what can be achieved.
A good set of music that included the songs Race Against The Sun, the very good I rewind, You’re Not Alone and Let Go was placed before the hearteningly large attendance, many of whom were not alive when the likes of the Godfathers of British Metal Iron Maiden were themselves on a slippery path to obscurity between 1995 and 2004. They were well received and played with the enthusiasm that you would expect. It is just time is not an enemy, it is there to guide you and play alongside you, teaching as it goes, Diamond Days have the potential to go far if they listen to the clock more closely.
Ian D. Hall