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#1293: Nine Black Alps – Strangest Feeling

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Back in 2011, Nine Black Alps’ website looked like this. If you click on that link and scroll down a little, you can see that the band allowed you to stream their albums, 2005’s Everything Is and Love/Hate from 2007, as well as their whole catalogue of B-sides and a collection of their demos. Why I was on their website at the time, I can’t remember. But what I can say for sure is through launching the audio player under the ‘B-sides’ section, their inclusion being due to “public demand”, I came to know the subject of today’s post. ‘Strangest Feeling’ was a B-side released on a specific vinyl release of the ‘Burn Faster’ single. Strange that it was released only on vinyl, yet it’s available to listen to on streaming services. That’s not usually how things go. But in 2011, when I was 16 and already a big Nine Black Alps follower, finding these “new” songs felt like stumbling upon a gold mine.

‘Strangest Feeling’ was a tune I got into right away. Got a vivid memory of singing it loud in the bathroom while looking at myself in the mirror and brushing my teeth in the morning. Songwriter and guitarist Sam Forrest takes on the point of view of someone who becomes a family man. In his words, “[finds] a house and a wife and started breeding”. But this situation’s only really described in the first verse, with the second being a kind of list of contradictory statements, “I’m not coming up, I’m going down”, “I’m ecstatic, there’s no feeling,” et cetera, et cetera. A bit of a mish-mash of themes going on in this song. It may seem like a bit of a writing exercise in that case, and maybe that’s why it was considered a B-side rather than a number that could be considered album-worthy. But its hooky guitar riff and multitude of melodic points have always stood out to me. Like ‘So in Love’, there’s something very ’90s about the whole thing. In fact, this to me sounds more Nirvana than anything from Everything Is.

Ever since hearing it all that time ago, I’ve always thought of it as a really well-delivered, concise pop-rock tune. Poppy by Nine Black Alps standards. The Love/Hate era of the band was one in which Sam Forrest wanted to focus more on a melodic approach to his songwriting and performance, as opposed to the intense, straight-up hard rock found on predecessor Everything Is. It was a change that didn’t work so well, at least not to me, and Forrest has gone on to say that some songs on the album strayed from what he had envisioned. Had they taken those songs off and replaced them with the B-sides such as ‘Destination Nowhere’, ‘Daytime Habit’, ‘Heartstring’ and, obviously, ‘Strangest Feeling’, I think we all would have had a much stronger album on our hands. Always a shame when things don’t always work out the way we want them to.

#1254: Nine Black Alps – Southern Cross

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Nine Black Alps’ Everything Is is an album that I don’t think is known by a great number of people. But those of us who know recognise it’s really a very good one. Released in 2005 in the midst of the whole post-punk revival thing where bands like Bloc Party and The Futureheads were thriving, just to name a couple, the heaviness and angst Nine Black Alps presented in their music and throughout Everything Is immediately made critics mention Nirvana in their reviews. That might be an obvious comparison to some people. I’ve never really been able to see it. Maybe I’m just kidding myself. I’ve come to think the band were too different to the happening scene of the time, so the only way people would get prospective listeners to become interested would be to stick ‘Nirvana’ in their pieces and see where it went from there.

Whatever conclusions you draw for the album are all yours to keep. You can share them too, I wouldn’t mind. I’m pretty confident in my thoughts on it. On this site, you’ll see I’ve written about every other track from Everything Is. After this, there’s only one more left and that’s the full house. And again, people who know this album will know what song it is. But the focus today is on the album’s final track, ‘Southern Cross’. When I heard it the first time, I thought it wouldn’t have worked if it was anywhere else in the sequencing. I would have only been 12 years old at the time, but in the 12-year-old way I picked up on the sense of closure that’s brought about by the music and the lyrical sentiment. The song duration also mirrors that of album opener ‘Get Your Guns’, which is most likely a big coincidental happening, but I take interest in little things like that.

‘Southern Cross’ seems to be about the disappointment in being let down by “friends” and being taken advantage of. The struggle the song’s narrator feels in trying to take things on by themselves and ultimately failing leaves them in a state of helplessness, the song’s main refrain being a pained cry of “So what do I do?” A bit of a downer, sure. But it’s somewhat overridden by the emphatic guitars and general performance of the band, framed around the ascending/descending guitar riff that begins the song and also appears in between the first chorus and second verse. I dig how the bass guitar appears to be the loudest instrument you can hear during those riffy parts, cuts through the mix like a knife. And when you expect the melody to follow the route it has taken in the previous choruses, singer Sam Forrest raises it unexpectedly for the last one. With a firm crash, the song ends and the guitars ring out for a good 20 seconds, feeding back into a void of silence. It’s a great way to end a great album.

#1231: Nine Black Alps – So in Love

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Although I wished it wasn’t the case, I remember being slightly disappointed by Nine Black Alps’ Love/Hate album. Their debut Everything Is was and is so great. The power and energy from the songs on there was off the scale. The 12-year-old me in late 2007 was expecting the same when the band’s sophomore album came around. That wasn’t to be the case though. There was less power and more of a focus on the musicality and the melodies with a rougher recording style too. The songs didn’t leave much of an effect on me, except ‘Forget My Name’ which I’ve written about before. I ripped it to my iTunes library, though. Could always have another listen one day.

And years later I did. I can’t remember what year exactly. I’m sure it would have been after the band released their third album. Maybe even their fourth. But it was on that re-listen that ‘So in Love’, the ninth song on Love/Hate suddenly sprang out to me. That particular track is the shortest one on the album, a sharp shock lasting for just over two minutes. It’s led by an ugly-sounding riff that’s more Nirvana than anything they did on the first album, as Sam Forrest alternates between softly singing and harshly yelling about the chokehold being in love can have on a person. Or at least that’s what I get from listening and looking at the lyrics.

‘Burn Faster’ was the first single to be released in the lead-up to Love/Hate. If you listen to that song, you can probably tell why. But I like to imagine a world where ‘So in love’ was that first piece of new music Nine Black Alps provided after those couple years of waiting. It’s really nothing like anything on Love/Hate and is a bit of a ‘What the fuck’ moment as a result, but it still has those melodic hooks than can win you over. The “Try to get out, try to get out” choruses sound so ’90s and are fun to sing along too, there’s a use of two-part harmonies during the verses that they never did on their first album. The whole track gives a huge rush that is sorely missing throughout the whole record. A lot of the B-sides from this era of the band probably could have been on here instead. There’s one in particular that will come around on here soon.

#1205: Nine Black Alps – Shot Down

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2005’s the year I came to know Nine Black Alps. It’s a story I’ve told before, last time in the post for ‘Not Everyone’. But the summary is, couple videos appeared on MTV2, I wasn’t into them. ‘Not Everyone’ appeared on the radar. I really got into that. And then at Christmas, I got FIFA 06 and Burnout Revenge as presents. The band were on the soundtracks for both games. ‘Cosmopolitan’ on the former and today’s song, ‘Shot Down’, on the latter. Someone at EA Sports must have been a fan. And because of countless hours of playing both games on my part, singing along to either tune in the process, I eventually became one too. Still got my physical copy of Everything Is sitting on a shelf. One of my favourite albums, and I don’t think anyone knows about it.

To a ten-year-old, there’s not much more fun you can think of than crashing cars without having to consider the consequences. And that was essentially what Burnout Revenge was all about. The soundtrack was killer. You had the ‘Red Flag’ demo by Billy Talent which was always better than the final version. OK Go’s ‘Do What You Want’. ‘Helicopter’ by Bloc Party, which funnily enough was in FIFA 06 as well. I could go on. It was stacked. So many great hits. And it always felt so cathartic when you crashed into a car on a specific downbeat or emphatic moment in a tune. Oh, what a thrill. Those were the days, man. Getting choked up just thinking about it now. If ‘Shot Down’ appeared during a race or whatever, it never got a skip. It was another track that added to the pent-up energy the game already provided. I came to later find out that the song as it was in the soundtrack was censored by EA, with the mention of guns and killing sons being slightly altered. It’s funny to hear the EA version now. My mind was made up. I had to get the Nine Black Alps album that all these songs were on. And I did, wanna say a few months later.

‘Shot Down’ is the eighth track on Everything Is. The record up to that point is a whole heavy but melodic affair, bar for the one serene acoustic moment, and ‘Shot Down’ carries on the same feel. Some people listening to the track for the first time may get a sense of rhythmic displacement. Feeling like singer Sam Forrest begins singing too early or something. Explanation is, during the intro, the guitars are struck on the upbeat rather than the down. Knowing this, I can still lose the timing sometimes. Usual guitarist David Jones and then bassist Martin Cohen switched roles on this tune for whatever reason, but the results are still A1. References in the song regarding laying low, saving oneself, hiding guns and killing sons (like I said earlier) reinforce a feeling I’ve always had that the LP had a concept about living during wartime. There’s lots of other references of the like scattered in other songs on there too. So I’ve always thought ‘Shot Down’ is more or less part of that story. What that story is, I’m not sure. I could maybe tweet Sam Forrest about it one day. But I feel there’s a thread there. The music video for it, above, was also the first one the band ever made. So that’s a nice note.

#946: Nine Black Alps – Not Everyone

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Back in 2005, Nine Black Alps released their debut album Everything Is. Now, I can remember being alive at that time, seeing songs like ‘Unsatisfied’ and ‘Just Friends’ being played on MTV2. I thought both tracks were all right, didn’t grab me too much. But I distinctly remember an advert promoting Everything Is showing up on TV, and a little clip of a music video by the band that I hadn’t seen before was used in it. That small clip turned out to be from the video for ‘Not Everyone’, and I liked it so much that I went to search for the full video. Luckily, the band had it on their official website. This is back when YouTube wasn’t existing. And when I found it, I repeatedly watched it on Windows Media Player, even if my old computer’s poor Internet connection meant that I had to suffer through long moments of buffering.

All these years of listening to it, I don’t think I fully know what it’s about. I don’t think there are any widely available interviews out there that could help me in telling you either. What I’m sure of though is that it doesn’t hold the most positive of sentiments. What drew me in initially was the riff during the intro. Once I got into that, there wasn’t much going back as it repeats itself through the song’s verses. Beyond the riff, I really appreciated how the instruments sort of played with one another. Like during the pre-choruses when the guitars drop out to let an emphatic strike of the tom-tom ring out. Or how during the verses, one guitar’s feedback will be blaring in one ear while the other guitar plays a riff in the other. Everything section has a smooth transition into the next, from intro to verse to pre-chorus to chorus and the same again, but it turns out that the track is heavy and quite intense, which makes it all the more awesome.

If it wasn’t for this track, I don’t think I would have became as big a fan of Nine Black Alps as I ended up becoming. ‘Not Everyone’ was great, that was clear. The two songs I mentioned in the first paragraph were up in the air. But then it turned out that Nine Black Alps would be in the soundtrack of almost every game by EA that was released later in the year. I’m exaggerating of course. But ‘Cosmopolitan’ appeared in FIFA 06, and ‘Shot Down’ in Burnout Revenge. It only made sense that I got the album, based on how many good times those games and songs brought into my life. Good decision too, ’cause Everything Is is a personal 10/10 of mine. Doesn’t feel like it’s aged at all.