With a name that will stir the loins of fans of American hard rock’s colourful legacy – Jim Dandy remains one of the great lost heroes of the genre – Denmark’s Black Oak County are a strange beast.

Sadly, they don’t sound anything like Black Oak Arkansas; In fact, worryingly, they often sound like a gonzoid mix of Nickelback and Black Stone Cherry, another band that promises the mystique of America’s South without ever really following through on the promise… But somehow, and I’m still agonising on just how, they manage to pull off a bit of a coup with their new album III...

Maybe it’s the no-side, irony free sincerity with which they attack the task at hand; these blokes certainly walk it like they talk it, and the gratifying heaviness of the guitars on this album often carries the day as songs threaten to drift away into faceless radio rock territory.

Tracks like Boom Boom Baby and Timebomb are gormless slabs of good time goonery for sure, but you know they’ll set it off in the live environment, and sometimes isn’t the excuse to pogo around your living room singing along at throat-shredding volume all we actually really need from bands like BOC?

I’d say it definitely is, and on those terms you’d have no hesitation in any way in declaring III a resounding, big-bollocked success. When the cement-mixer churn of the axes of Niels Beier and Jack Svendsen kick your ears in on best track Wake Up (a song that would have been gigantic had it appeared in 1996 by the way and would doubtless still be all over US radio today),  you know that resistance is useless. Break out the air guitars!

At the end of the day Black Oak County have found their niche and they know how to exploit it; They do what they do incredibly well, so who am I to pick holes in the result? Good luck to them and here’s to many more…

III is out now.