Oh my days… As you’re well aware, we’re in the midst of an absolute tsunami of feel-good early eighties melodic hard rock nostalgia acts these days, and just when you thought you were up to speed on all the good ‘uns, up pops another. Ladeez and gennelmen… we give you Notörious!

If you love this sorta stuff then this album is gonna go straight to the top of your list as the band conjure up a heady mix of names like Dokken, The Scorpions, Steeler, and Mötley Crüe in a rampant half hour of of I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-1987 fun an’ games. The band’s eponymous anthem sounds like the Crüe and da Scorps battling it out in a tour bus just outside Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1983; and whilst it’s true that vocalist Chris Houdini is going to have to work hard to escape those Klaus Meine comparisons (I told you no jokes – Ed), you just find yourself suspending your disbelief for the duration of the ten songs on offer and giving yourself to the band with the sort of abandon they’ve clearly given to the world of rock themselves.

This is utterly life-affirming stuff, the kinda stuff that plants a smile on your lips from bar one that you know ain’t gonna leave the face until the whole thing’s done and dusted and the needle is heading back to track one to do it all again. And if Houdini is just a little too much for you at times then there’s always the guitar pyrotechniques of Nikki DiCato for you to enjoy. Equal parts Lynch, Jabs, Malmsteen and Mars he’s a real star in the making, a white hot six string superstar in waiting who impresses on every track.

Friday Night is the sort of balls out anthem Loudness would have killed for in 1986, whilst I Walked In heads back to the Scorpions at the height of their sleazy game circa Lovedrive. It really is that good!

Of course, there’s nothing here you haven’t heard done before. But everything is done so well that the whole album becomes an unstoppable hair metal force, an undeniable lesson in rocking and rolling that I’m glad I enrolled for… The attention to detail is staggering, and yet at no point does the band surrender their soul in favour of mere sterilised apery. This, then, is a very modern version of the real deal. And I like it.

Glamorized is out on March 31st.