Originally Posted by Unknown Soldier

I don't know how worthy my response will be, but given the fact that I think that Lightning to the Nations is one of the greatest metal albums recorded I'll try.

In my review I harped on about how I felt Diamond Head as a band had captured the essence of all the band's that influenced them, rather than just trying to blend these influences in like a lot of other bands were doing at the time, something I felt gave the band a different feel. Btw this is something that I've never actually read but always felt about the band.

Also I often find that when people get into metal from other types of music, their entry point into metal is usually from something not too different from what they already like. For example somebody into punk will probably come in through hardcore and into thrash, somebody from prog rock will look at prog metal etc, whereas somebody like myself who came through AOR would look for melodic metal with a sense of flair, which often means they won't see the finer details of something they might be not be that used to, for me I still struggle to get into heavily influenced punk stuff etc. Now as for DH I got into them quite late as a metal listener (I kind of bypassed them) but when I did get into them it was like discovering a pot of gold that I'd completely missed and had all the aspects that I looked for in a metal band and what made it even better was that the songs took their time to creep into my subconscious and when they did that was it.

Finally not griping at anybody here, but a lot of people make the mistake of comparing the band to Metallica for the simple reason that Metallica namechecked them so much, meaning that they quite often start comparing the two bands. Fact is Diamond Head were deep rooted style wise in the 1970s, but due to their grasp of song dynamics and flair were able to add a number of potent special metal potions to the mix, that just happened to inspire some thrash metal bands.