Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There will be those who proclaim music as a right, a sentence of fury to be carried across their whole lives and yet will never look beyond what they know, to whom the comfortable has become as important as the way they are seen to act in public, how their image betrays them when they wear a T-shirt of a band they have perhaps never seen, (not really an issue with the way stands on economic meltdown) but who also could not name a single song they have written. It is the look and appearance over the genius of the work provided and no matter what you think of the group or the inspiration behind the thoughts, the irreplaceable Glen Danzig, then to not hear them play is to deny your music palate to expand.

The first single from Danzig’s new album Black Laden Crow, the impressive and hard hitting Devil On Hwy 9 has its own distinctive memory attached to it, arguably in tune with the time, one that looks back over the last 25 years to the seminal Danzig III: How The God’s Kill album and the once thought of impossible reunion and now historic gathering of the classic Misfits lineup, the man who symbolizes the attitude of devil may care but one who also truly lives life to the maximum and stands in the same impressive footprints as the much missed Lemmy. This is the reason why Glen Danzig remains such an impressive figure on the Metal circuit and is exactly the reason why Devil On Hwy 9 is just as important to grapple with as anything released in the last quarter of a century.

Mayhem and the Devil may always be in good company, for they rub shoulders with the so called political elite, with the corruptible and the dishonest; for Danzig, nobody could dare suggest that honesty is not a driving force behind the music and the single upholds that sense of emotional attachment perfectly.

If the Devil On Hwy 9 is anything to go by then the new album is going to be explosive, a red line on the temperature gauge that should not be crossed but then that would not be honest, it would not be Danzig and with a simple flick of the strings the band tear that red line apart.

A superb return, the gathering of the beasts of Heavy Metal has once more started in earnest and the Devil stands no chance.

Ian D. Hall