Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

It is a responsibility that must be faced with strength and humility that if you find a young group of musicians who have blown you away the very first time you see them, you have to go and find them again, give them another listen to just make sure that what you heard was a musical truth and not the first signs of sentimental middle age. You owe it to yourself to go along with a view of dispassionate attention and steel yourself to find that age has tempered your thinking.

In the case of Liverpool’s heavy Metal band Black Diamond, you could live to be cynical crabby 100 year old and receiving a telegram of a purring monarch, you would still find your first impression to be correct and the smile of expectant romanticism would still grab your music memory and, in the words of Metallica, bang the head that doesn’t bang.

You have to have some fortitude to your game if, as a band performing in the heavier genre, you can look an audience in the eye and play with the type of un-shockable gusto George Michael’s Careless Whisper. The song may be considered a pop classic, or indeed the type of track that only should be recorded by those in desperate danger of needing a number one hit but in the hands of Black Diamond it took on a different persona. It growled like a tiger looming in the smog filled streets of Victorian London, the beast having not been fed a proper diet of raw meat and anything it found straggling in the late night gloom fair game to be devoured. Young bands covering songs and not concentrating on their own songs can be on the side of depressing, however when they have the absolute guts to do something so unexpected, so unbelievably superb with a song that many hold close to their hearts, and subvert it, then let them bring it on, that tiger, after all, needs to feed.

The entire band is of such a quality that given their young age, you just know that they can only get bigger. It is of the type of depth of character in Dan Byrne and the rest of the band that resides in the heart of the stalking tiger. In tracks that are as excellent loud and live as they appear on the debut E.P, that tiger is in danger of being hunted down itself. The brutal crash of a drum cymbal, the ferociousness of a guitar and the voice of a passionate, force of nature comes home in songs such as Take Me, Down In Flames, Left To Die Alone, a rather wonderful take on Whitesnake’s Fool For Your Loving and the storming set closer of Idiosyncrasies. All of this is given fire in the belly by the appearance of Tom McGrath’s bass which spits venom and places the spirit of youth well into the tiger’s den.

To make sure that a first impression is right, the sooner you see a young group perform again, the better it is for your musical sanity, Black Diamond soothe the aching furrow and show you that they truly are mean, Metal eating machine who are unafraid and unimpeded by the appearance of mawkish middle age fans who may lament the passing days of Iron Maiden’s appearances at The Rainbow lauding them. Black Diamond are amongst the finds of 2014, greats, if looked after properly and if they want to keep the desire going, in the making.

Ian D. Hall