Band: Diablo Blvd
Album title: Builders Of Empires
Label: PIAS
Distributor: PIAS
Release date: 25/05/2011
Release: CD

Diablo Blvd. is a Belgian band started by comedian Alex Agnew in 2005. The man is being backed up by Dave Hubrechts, Kris Martens, Andries Beckers, Tim Bekaer. They already released a demo and a full album (in 2099) witch had some success and gave the opportunity to play some Belgian festivals, but also various special gigs.
So the band decided to make another album after all that success and just released their latest creation “Builders Of Empires” at the end of last month. To be honest I was afraid when I found out about that this is a “famous” comedian’s band. Most of the time projects like these come into existence when the stop being funny and think they can actually do something else. And in the process use their “famous” status to directly get attention and make more money. Many have tried but only few like Tenacious D have ever succeeded.
So the band delivers a combination of rock and punk and sometimes even going towards a “Danzig” kind of genre but still very original. The thing that I’ve noticed immediately was that it were clean vocals. Yes that normal in this genre, but strange when you know Alex and know that he is into the heavier genres of metal. The second thing that I’ve noticed and that actually bothered me a lot was the sound of the band. The guitar sound to be specific witch sounds like a gaming console from the 60’s. Overall it’s not bad music and it does have a few good tracks, but the thing I feared most came to life as it doesn’t really live up to it’s expectations.

79/100

Jeroen.