Rising Irish rock band Black Dog Moon have recently released their second album ‘Hell and Back’. Built around an old school sound, the record’s harder edged tracks ‘Neon Queen’ and ‘Heavy Shot of Love’ show how well the musicians can work a thunderous melodic metal riff or two, but it’s when channelling more melodic influences that the album really comes alive. The album’s clear standout ‘Black Hearts and Diamonds’ shares a classic 70s blues rock feel and comes absolutely loaded with confident lead guitar work that appears to draw its biggest influence from Gary Moore’s “slow” reworking of Thin Lizzy’s classic ‘Don’t Believe A Word’, while the buoyant melodic rock of ‘1985’ sounds like Meat Loaf fronting a party rock band with rootsy undertones.

Despite the album’s more interesting musical deviations, the band pitching one of its bigger metal-based workouts as a focus track. The emotive ‘Holy War’ is musically broad, however. The semi-acoustic approach of the first verse presents the band’s softer side, reeling in the audience very slowly. The mellow arrangement also allows attention to be drawn to a powerful lyric and huge vocal, but it isn’t long before the band begin to thunder, with a great 80s inspired melodic metal riff in hand. The guitar tones during the heavier parts of the song come through very naturally calling back to a world of metal from just after the NWOBHM boom, but it’s a huge twin lead that will ultimately leave the strongest impression, musically speaking, powering an instrumental break that’s absolutely flawless. What’s most unepected here – especially if approaching this from the perspective of a “trad metal” fan – is the slightly warbly vocal. It’s even more affected than on ‘1985’, and as such, it owes more to Demis Roussos in his Aphrodite’s Child Days than the work of many a metal legend you could care to name. That could split opinion, but it definitely helps this band to stand out and be instantly recognisable.

Take a listen to ‘Holy War’ below. If you like what you hear, backtracking and checking out the full album could be listening time well spent.