Buyer beware! Captain Black Beard are not another in the seemingly endless stream of rubbish ‘Pirate metal’ bands cluttering up the airwaves…

Despite the awful name, these five Swedes actually peddle a rather nice line in heavy, melody soaked AOR that’s sure to find a welcome response amongst anyone who’s ever owned and loved a Survivor or Foreigner album. Key to this is the honeyed vocal assault of Martin Holsner; Holsner’s voice sits pleasingly somewhere between Survivor man Jimi Jamison and Tyketto‘s Danny Vaughan, giving even the less interesting material on offer here a real classy sheen that’s an absolute joy to listen to.

The guitar partnership of Christian Ek and Daniel Krakowski keeps things nicely on the harder edge of the AOR spectrum, with tracks like opener Flamenco really benefitting from the harder edge the two axe option offers.

Obvious comparisons will be drawn between CBB and fellow Swedish retroactivists The Night Flight Orchestra; however, where Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid and company (RIP David Andersson) actively seek out and accentuate the kitsch inherent in much classic AOR and yacht rock, these guys are happy to concentrate simply on the substance rather than the style, delivering in the process a more solid but ultimately more reliable take on the genre.

Physical is absolutely superb, centred around a titanic chorus and some clean, crisp, chug from the guitarists, effortlessly recreating AOR’s glory years and provoking outbreaks of rampant goosebump activity all over your reviewer’s body upon first contact. I had to have a lie down and have cool flannels applied to my brow, let me tell you!

From front to back, Captain Black Beard have come up with a joyous celebration of everything that was great about hard rock in the eighties on Neon Sunrise; not only that, they manage to avoid the pitfalls of cliche that many acts operating in this area fall foul of, preferring instead to simply let their immensely talented songwriting do the talking. In many ways that makes this album revelatory, but even if such hyperbole leaves you cold you’ll struggle to put up a credible argument against such a statement when confronted with frankly superb tracks such as Invincible. Essential listening!

Neon Sunrise releases on October 7th.