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#1458: Nine Black Alps – Vampire in the Sun

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So Nine Black Alps’ third album Locked Out from the Inside was released on 5th October 2009 – 17 years ago last Monday – which is actually insane. I mean, I’ve been around and existing for the two albums the band had released before it. But when it comes to Locked Out… I vividly remember being very excited for its arrival after ‘Buy Nothing’ was released as a download, and sort of its first single, in April 2009. The song was the first sign that the pummeling, heavy but melodic hard rock that I really liked the Alps for – exhibited on debut 2005’s Everything Is – was back, after they’d gone down a softer, for lack of a better word, approach on 2007’s Love/Hate. ‘Buy Nothing’ was on repeat, I tell you. Sometime between April and October when I was probably looking for the song again, I came across the band playing what appeared to be a new song called ‘Vampire in the Sun’ live on the television station Channel M – a channel exclusive to the people of Manchester – via a YouTube video. Gonna embed that exact video below. And after hearing it, I was all in. I had a deep, deep feeling that this forthcoming album was going to be special.

Things got even better, because the album ended up being streamed exclusively on we7.com, a whole two months earlier. That’s how the site looked in December that year. So I’ve been listening to the album since August 2009. It’s crazy. Time is definitely something. I liked the whole thing there and then. Credit for changing things up on the last album, but this was the Nine Black Alps I knew. ‘Vampire in the Sun’ is Locked Out’s… opener. It’s a strong one. Opens very boldly with frontman Sam Forrest on guitar, laying down the song’s riff, before everyone else launches in to properly get things underway. The phrase ‘Vampire in the Sun’, you’ll see it and think there’s a lot of angst behind it. I know that’s what I definitely thought. Vampires, blood, Dracula, gothic, other associations. But thinking about it for the sake of this post, I think the song captures a narrator who tells themselves that they’re going to see the good in people, even though they may have done wrong in the past, and make the best out of the day no matter what happens. Very quickly though, the narrator finds themselves way out of their depth. They’re already a pessimist at heart and consider themselves a bit of a useless person, a bit like a vampire in the sun. ‘Cause they die once they’ve been exposed to sunlight and all that. It’s still very angsty actually after laying my interpretation down.

Song’s structure, pretty standard. First verse, second verse, chorus, third verse, chorus, instrumental break, chorus done to death ’til end. Still executed very nicely. My favourite part? When Forrest yells out ‘Sun’ followed by that moment of silence before the band fall into the song’s final moments. I still get chills in that silence. That exact part was what sold me when I heard the song the first time via the aforementioned live performance. I got a physical copy of Locked Out from the Inside in January 2010. Still have the CD somewhere around. I was always looking forward to whatever Nine Black Alps did after it. 2012’s Sirens came around, and what turned out to be their final album, Candy for the Clowns followed a couple years later. Sadly, I never liked those two albums as much. As a result, I sort of see Locked Out… as the last, really great album the band did. I can firmly say it’s my second favourite by them. You can probably guess which one’s on top. But as I’ve come to the realisation that this’ll be the very last time a Nine Black Alps will ever appear on this blog, I’ve got to make clear that all of the music the band did I just personally hold a great attachment to. Was just 10 years old when I came across them, thought they were cool and liked them ever since. They also used to see my posts whenever I wrote about their songs on the old Blogspot site and liked them on their Twitter page. If they were to reunite one day, with the original members too, I’d be intrigued to see what came out of it.

#1453: Nine Black Alps – Unsatisfied

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I remember when the video for Nine Black Alps’ ‘Unsatisfied’ was the band’s new video playing regularly on MTV2. I didn’t want to watch it, because singer/guitarist Sam Forrest’s glum face would appear on the screen, the first thing you see, and I would be bummed out almost immediately. I would have been 10 years old, and I didn’t want to see someone looking so unhappy. So I would switch channels and see what other things were on. I think the track might have been the first one that made me aware of the band’s existence. But I wasn’t sticking around if a gap of silence and a sad mug was my introduction to their music. My opinion on Nine Black Alps as a whole changed when the advert for the band’s album Everything Is started showing in places. ‘Not Everyone’ sounded cool in it. My opinion on ‘Unsatisfied’ was officially made for the better, funnily enough, ’cause of its inclusion in a pivotal scene in One Tree Hill. Why was I watching that show? Two words: Older sister. The song sounded very cool in that scene, though. Made me think, “That’s what ‘Unsatisfied’ sounds like?” Clearly, not watching its music video meant I had missed out a little.

But then I got Everything Is as a present, and I could listen to the song whenever I wanted. ‘Unsatisfied’ is the fourth song on there. The intro builds, layer-by-layer. Guitarist David Jones opens with the higher guitar riff, Sam Forrest joins in with the lower one, and then Martin Cohen and James Galley come in together on bass and drums. The classic brick-by-brick opening technique. Then Sam Forrest sings about trying to get something out of the world as much as possible, but always ending up empty-handed. He’s unsatisfied. Sick and tired of all he’s tried. And that’s really all the song comes down to. Being disappointed with what this world has on offer and having a feeling that things would be better in another lifetime. A downer in the subject theme, yes. But it’s still all so melodic despite what may be going on in the words. And the riffage and power behind the performance? Very emphatic. That rundown during the “Sick and tired…” part of the chorus, one of my favourite parts of the entire song. And then there’s that sudden key change for the “Should look where you’re going” bridge. A bit unexpected. But it’s the surprise that makes it that much better.

The song got to number 30 in the UK Singles chart in its time. Makes me think what happened. The charts used to have such a variety. I don’t know what goes on in them anymore. And if you may or may not have noticed, me writing about ‘Unsatisfied’ means that I’ve written about every song from Everything Is on here. A clean sweep, royal flush. I think this may be the first time that’s ever happened on the blog, writing about all the songs on one album. I think Everything Is is great, it hasn’t aged a bit. A ten outta ten in my book. The band always got compared to Nirvana back in the day, which I think critics always used to bring them down a little. This was in the middle of the whole post-punk revival era. Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, they were the bands that got people talking. I never got the Nirvana comparison, but I guess an American-sounding band from the UK wasn’t what was the masses wanted, even if they were doing what they did very well. But it Nine Black Alps apart, for sure. ‘Cause of that, I don’t think “This is England in the mid-2000s” when I’m listening to Everything Is. I just hear some good, fast and heavy melodic rock, with a couple acoustic numbers in there for mellowing’s sake. So it’s my recommendation that anyone reading this, if you’re into that sort of stuff, go and hear it. I’ve written about it on 12 different occasions, for goodness sake, it’s worth it.

#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.