Kev Rowland Black Diamonds came together in 2004, and are a hard rock band based in the Rhine Valley in eastern Switzerland. They released their debut, self-produced album ‘First Strike’ in 2008, containing ten original songs plus a cover version of Chuck Berry's classic “Rock n’ Roll Music”. That album is no longer available, but they reworked some of the songs for this release. Their second album, ‘Perfect Sin’ was released in 2013, and now four yearls later they are back with their third. As soon as this hit the player I found I had a smile on my face, and the reason for that is this a good-time Eighties melodic rock album that any fan of classic Def Leppard will appreciate.

It is as if grunge, downtuning and extreme metal never took place, and intead we have a party band that are playing great riffs, with loads of melodies and harmony vocals. It hasn’t been sanitised out of existence, and so can even be a guilty pleasuer for those who enjoy hard rock, but sometimes want something a little more melodic. Hey, Nickelback do pretty well for themselves and I don’t know anyone who will admit to owning any of their albums, right? (I have just one, but it was sent to me by a label, honest).

It is uplifiting, it is punchy, it has balls and melodies, but more than anything else this is good plain fun, and I still smile whenever I play it. These guys are definietly worth investigating, so go onto their site and see what I mean

Stephen This year, I must admit that the well of glam was pretty much dried up and thankfully BLACK DIAMONDS' new album surfaced and blew a fresh air to this scene. With fourteen tracks presented minus intro, you'd get a rich selection of killer stuffs with powerful riffs here such as the astonishing opener 'Judgement Day', the radio friendly 'I'll Be OK' which I think the best track here, the euphoric 'We Want To Party' that's suitable to be your Friday night soundtrack, or the spectacular party-vibe hard rock piece of 'Somebody Put Something In My Drink'.

The drawback of that many tracks is that you'd bump into several weaker tracks, and in this case, I'm afraid the slower part / ballads of this album is inferior compared to the energetic tracks. I can live without 'Take My Life', 'Hold On', or 'A Thousand Roses', but all of them aren't bad at all though.

For an indie album, hats off to the production value as it's almost flawless. Musicianship level is very good, I admire the guitar part and Mich also has a very unique vocal timbre. A few holes here and there that should have been patched in the next album, but BLACK DIAMONDS has proven their skill and talent on 'Perfect Sin' that they soon will compete with other top tier bands such as CRASHDIET, CRAZY LIXX, or STEEL PANTHER.