By Monk
Look up the term “kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll” in the Oxford Dictionary Of Musical Terminology and you will see a number of references. One of them, of course, is this very website that you are reading at this exact moment in time, as we have been delivering exactly that for the past decade… and another will be legendary Swedish glunksters Diamond Dogs, who have been doing the same since the early part of the 1990s and are serving us a reminder of their collective genius with this, their latest slice of party-starting punk ‘n’ roll mayhem.
Drawing on the rock ‘n’ roll rapture created by Mott The Hoople and The Faces, in many ways, it could be argued that Diamond Dogs are Scandinavia’s equivalent of our very own rock ‘n’ roll reprobates The Quireboys and Tyla’s Dogs d’Amour: certainly, they’re of the same vintage and defiantly inhabit the same scarf-waving back-alley barroom boogie territory, fuelled by catchy-as-fuck riffs, rollicking honky-tonk piano lines and the sort of vocals achieved only by washing down freshly sharpened razorblades with copious amounts of cheap whiskey. Add in some massive organ sounds (and regular readers will know I have a penchant for massive organ sounds – ooh er matron!) and glorious gospel-style backing harmonies, and this is a delicious recipe that both sates your appetite and leaves you drooling in anticipation for the next course.
Evidencing the vintage attitude and sound which the band espouse, ‘About…’ was done the old-fashioned way: written, arranged, recorded, mixed and produced in just eight days in the early spring. And it shows, as these 12 songs possess a raw energy, a genuine sense of excitement and unpredictability, like lightning truly captured in the bottle at the exact millisecond of its creation. You can almost smell the smoke hanging in the air and taste the blood on the fingers from those fretboards being burned up.
If you only get one rock ‘n’ roll record this week, you could do a lot worst than this one…
- ‘About The Hardest Nut To Crack‘ is released today (Friday 29 September).
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