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Usually, bands load their best tracks on at the start of an album. Which is why so many fade away after the fourth or fifth track. But Leicester’s Skam have gone against convention by putting a lot of mediocre material into the first half of their second album.

It’s all competently dull. Songs which disappear from memory as soon as they, erm, disappear. But just as you’re ready to write off Peacemaker, it bursts into life with the groove grab of The Wire, and builds from there. Fortune Favours The Brave sparkles with a caustic riff, The Prince is close on being a modern day pop-rock masterpiece, and Let’s Get Rocked has a priapic vibe that belies the clichéd title.

Why didn’t Skam start with this lot and grab everyone’s attention? Who knows. But once they get going, this mix of The Temperance Movement and early Leppard really fires.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.