Since Aussies Dead City Ruins kicked off their campaign to bring real rock back to the masses in 2015 an entire genre – not to mention cottage industry – has grown up around the type of music they are making. The New Wave of Classic Rock has utterly swamped the market for bands making eighties music with a nineties edge, and suddenly bands like DCR aren’t quite as out on a limb as they used to be.

All of this means that you need a real edge, a point of difference, if you’re going to stand out from the masses, and on new album Shockwave DCR don’t really exhibit one; Everything is well played and well sung – new singer Steve Welsh is a real step up – but the songs themselves, for the most part, just don’t do enough consistently to wrest your hard earned out of the wallet with any more alacrity than any other NWoCR band currently doing the rounds.

That said, when the band do hit the mark, they do so very well indeed. Mid-album there’s a three song run – the superb Dog On a Leash, the fast-paced This Side of The Dirt and the bluesy, bass-driven Drifter – where the band sound like true world beaters. Dog On A Leash, especially, with it’s gang vocals, low-slung guitar heroics and committed vocal delivery might well have beaten the resurgent Skid Row to the punch for the award of best hair metal anthem of 2022; it’s a perfect piece of hard rocking retroactivity, and it will be on the Strickmann stereo for a fair while to come…

Doubtless these guys are great live, and even the more workaday material here will obviously grow tenfold in stature when played balls out, axes swinging in a sweaty club, or even a European festival field; but at the moment for this reviewer Shockwave as a whole is a good, no very good, album, rather than a great one. But give it a listen yourself and see what you think – apparently I’ve been wrong before…

Shockwave releases on August 19th.