Well I'll be damned, I have to review the new DIAMOND HEAD album! I saw that they were doing a massive world tour and coming to Montreal later on this year. I missed them the last two times, a small club show and they were part of the Heavy Mtl festival, I had to choose between ANTHRAX and DIAMOND HEAD, and so I went with my favorite band in the world.
DIAMOND HEAD have had a cult following since the early 80's and some say they were one of the very first New Wave of British Heavy Metal to make it big in Europe. A number of bands have done covers of them throughout the years including evidently METALLICA on the ''Garage Days Revisited'' cassette back in the day.

Like many of you I discovered this band later on because of those covers. I remember listening to the originals a number of years after and really seeing how they were an awesome band. I also had a few songs on some ''Knuckletracks'' compilations in the early 2000's I believe. They did a reissue of some older albums like ''Lightning to the Nations'' and ''Borrowed Time'' and it sounded fantastic. I definitely don't want to miss them next time they come to Montreal because this album is probably their best since the early 2000s. They have a new attitude and a change of direction with the addition of a new singer in Rasmus Bom Andersen. The guy has some wicked chops and has a lot of emotion and charisma in his voice. He may not have the vocal range of guys like Biff Byford or Bruce Dickinson but he adds a lot of character to the band. The guy fits really well in that Classic Rock vibe of this album.

The album starts off with four mediocre songs, extremely repetitive unfortunately. These aren't bad at all but not really memorable. I said to myself, oh no, if the rest of the album is like that, it's going to be a very long 50 minutes! Safe to say I was wrong, starting at the fifth song ''All the Reasons You Live'', it really picks up. The songs are faster and the riffs are much more original. Brian Tatler does a magnificent job starting at that point and from then on in, you don't want the album to stop. Each song bring its own energy and originality to the album. One of the negative points of this album is the production value. I know we waited a very long time for this album. We heard about in the Metal Websites that they were working on new material for a good number of years actually and not it finally got released. Well the guitars and vocals are fine but the Bass and the Drums lack some veritable fine tuning. I felt the drums sounded really clunky (not as bad as ''St. Anger'' by METALLICA) but could have been much better. As for the Bass, well we don't hear it very well. The rest of the instruments seem to overshadow it. It's not a real big thing for me but I noticed it off the bat.

When they came back in 2002, they wanted to show the world that they still had ''it''. They weren't a flash in the pan because of their earlier works. They were a Heavy Metal band that evolved to a very Classic Rock-Metal band. They don't stray from the path of Traditional Heavy Metal, they simply put a different twist to classic sounds. This still sounds like something that could have been big in the early 80s and it's probably their best effort since ''Lightning to the Nations''. It's groovy, it's catchy and has some killer riffs. A number of songs off of this new release get stuck in your head, it's crazy! I listened to this album a number of times since I got it and it really grew on me. A very solid effort from a legendary and underrated band!