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