High Bias Listening with extreme prejudice May 9, 2004 Home | Archives | Features | Contact Us Aural Fixations
DIAMOND DOGS Black River Road (Smilodon) On its last album Too Much is Always Better Than Never Enough, the Swedish band Diamond Dogs did a note-perfect imitation of Rod Stewart's early 70s years, before he went Hollywood and ceased caring about making soulful rock & roll. Some might fault the band for stealing another artist's identity rather than finding one of its own, but hell, Rod the Mod hadn't made music like that in almost 30 years, and if no one else was gonna do it, why not Diamond Dogs? It helped that frontman Sulo has an excellent, grainy rock & roll voice and the songs were uniformly strong. For Black River Road, Sulo, guitarists Anders "Boba Fett" Lindstrom and Robert "Strings" Dahlqvist, both also of the Hellacopters, keyboardist Henrik Widen, bassist Johan Johansson and drummer Jesper Karlsson add horns, backup singers, guitarist Mattias Barjed from The Soundtrack of Our Lives and the music of the Rolling Stones and the Faces to their arsenal. The rubbery grooves, tasteful horns, restrained instrumentation and abundant hooks passionately and deliberately recall a time when rock wasn't afraid to acknowledge its roots in rhythm & blues–precisely the spirit in which the Stones and Stewart made music before they became self-conscious superstars. "Hand on Heart" and "Gotta Be Gone (It's Alright)," featuring Nicke Andersson of the Hellacopters, are stupendous pop songs that still sound like soul covers, while "Rush For Comfort" is the kind of tender, tough guy-with-a-heart- of-gold ballad no one makes anymore. "New Set of Wheels" and "Come Away" rock with more grease than Keith Richards has been lubricated with in years, and "Black River Road" is the kind of midtempo narrative worthy of its title. Diamond Dogs is so good at its chosen idiom that it begs the question: is a band really being derivative if it adds its own classics to a style that even its creators no longer practice? More importantly, if the resulting album is as good as Black River Road, do questions of derivation even matter anymore? I'll keep happily listening to Diamond Dogs to find out. Michael Toland
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