THE HARD STUFF
Diamond Head
Coffin Train SILVER LINING
Still Diamond geezers after all these years.
Diamond Head have become so mythic in the gold-gilded ledgers of metal history that it’s almost impossible not to compare whatever is happening now with the DH stuff Lars Ulrich was impressing his bandmates with way back when. But Diamond Head have always kept moving, evolving, perfecting.
Coffin Train is their second album with third vocalist Rasmus Andersen, and his powerful, emotive vocals continue to push the band into places they haven’t been before. While the whole affair is still solidly rooted in the Brit-metal of the Bronz label era, expansive stormers like Shades Of Black and Death By Design sound more like latter-day Soundgarden than like any other NWOBHM band still in operation. There’s an almost proggy complexity to this album’s songs, but the hooks, flash and the sheer wall-melting, roof-rattling riff majesty of mainman Brian Tatler are all still in place. Overall this is a fine addition to the DH legacy.
Sleazegrinder
Johnny Moped
Lurrigate Your Mind DAMAGED GOODS
He’s back, basically… Lock up your maces.
1977’s Live At The Roxy WC2 was an essential UK punk artefact. It helped launch Adverts, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex and more, but its star turn was Croydon’s Johnny Moped. But with vocal stylings akin to an impassioned Alf Garnett, a ready belch and a chunky dustman’s demeanour, bludgeon-toting frontman Moped (aka Paul Halford) wasn’t exactly ripe for major-label-assisted pop stardom.
Following a modest commercial performance by debut album Cycledelic (a heady blending of proto-street punk with lashed-‘n’-lairy biker-psych yobbishness), Johnny Moped effectively disappeared. An unexpected second set lurked out in ‘91, but Moped finally regained his ‘form’ in ‘16 with the Dick Crippen-produced It’s A Real Cool Baby.
And here he is again, back with Crippen, stalwart guitarist Slimey Toad at his side, making mayhem, elevating punky psychosis to new peaks of baffling, intoxicated ludicrousness. Lyrically we’ve got beer, LSD, failed romance, people being nailed to the floor and, on Black Witch Climax Blues Band Genetic Breakdown, some insightful stuff about guest guitarist Captain Sensible getting sacked from cleaning toilets at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls.
Johnny Moped’s brain: still a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Ian Fortnam
John Fairhurst
The Divided Kingdom UNMANAGEABLE
Gravel-throated Wigan bluesman gets heavy
Although he’s highly rated in blues circles as a virtuoso on the resonator acoustic guitar, London-based Lancastrian John Fairhurst still loves it loud. This crowd-funded solo album comes thundering out of your speakers, and it’s not just guitar, bass and drums that are on the warpath. ‘Fuck austerity… Fuck inequality… Fuck your hypocrisy,’ he growls on the title track, then the stoner churn of Blood And Fire further sets the tone for an album that rages against social injustice, from Brexit to poverty via mendacious politicians. It’s no one-dimensional rant, though; the Tom Waits-style menace of Lies And A .45 and the Mark Lanegan-esque lament of We Dance The Merry Dance weave a subtler but no less effective spell.
Johnny Sharp
Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard
Yn Ol I Annwn HEAVY SOUNDS
Welsh prog-metal voyagers crank up their space-rock side.
With a take-no-prisoners name like that, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard really need to deliver maximum heaviosity on all fronts. Thankfully, these Welsh doom-metal psych-prog sludgelords stretch almost every available envelope on this, their third album in four years, adding extra lashings of analogue synth oscillation, ghostly cello flurries and pagan folk-rock incantations to an already ripe mix. Occasionally their maximalist formula drags a little, notably on the 13-minutes-plus riff grinder Katyusha, which builds and builds with too little variation. But singer Jessica Ball is the group’s secret weapon, bringing focus and clarity to a molten maelstrom of grunts, drones and throbbing ring modulations. Ball’s vocal dexterity lends epic melodrama to star-gazing voyages like The Spaceships Of Ezekiel, and transforms the gloomy chamber ballad Du Bist Jetzt Nicht In Der Zukunft into a spooked lament that summons the occult spirit of cult seventies erotic horror movies. Even at their most ungainly, these Bastards have admirably grandiose Muse-meets-Hawkwind ambitions which are hard to fault.
Stephen Dalton
Honeyblood
In Plain Sight MARATHON ARTISTS
Trashy, compulsive third from a freshly solo Tweeddale.
’Some day I’ll get to be disgustingly happy and,’ Glasgow’s grunge empress Stina Tweeddale sings over sweet, tinkling keyboards at the end of her third album as Honeyblood, but there’s little sign so far of that happening. Having gone through two drummers in as many albums and finally struck out solo, she might have reigned in her magnificent beratings of scumbag exes so withering that they amount to sonic castration-‘,’ she insists on the rusted Ronettes rattle of –but, judging by the rats, cads and gadabouts she’s courting on and , she’s still hellbent on romantic conflict.
