DIGGING STUFF UP: Nine - 'Killing Angels'

It's from Sweden, and it sounds like it, but not in the way you might think.

NINE
’Killing Angels’
Burning Heart Records

Isn’t it funny how some countries, especially the ones that have given us a greater quantity of good bands throughout the years, seem to acquire a certain kind of musical personality after a while? It all has to do with how we perceive music and the patterns that our brains establish, but that does happen, it’s a sort of extention to the concept of a “scene”. Take Sweden, for example - the offer of awesome music, especially in the heavier genres, has been so rich and so influential that we can identify several different scenes and “personalities”, but if you get a heavy album from a Swedish band, you’ll be sort of expecting either death metal (“Swedish death metal” has turned, of course, into a whole genre in itself - I actually recovered an old article the other day where I discuss that with cool people from there), or good old 70s-infused rock’n’roll, or even some blistering punk, because Refused and a few others still have a lot to answer for.

The beauty of this Nine album I’ve dug up today, the fourth out of a total five they have released (do check out the others too, but this one is by far the best one), is that it makes total sense that it comes from Sweden, from Linköping to be more precise, but not in any of the more individual common ways mentioned above - it makes sense in all of them at the same time. On one hand, they are at heart a punk band (this came out on Burning Heart Records, the very same label ‘The Shape Of Punk To Come’ was released on, among many other gems), loose, unfussy, with the typical in-your-face intensity and ferocity of hardcore. Even Johan Lindqvist’s passionate, raspy vocals belong more in the hardcore camp than anywhere else.

But then, when the chugging riffs are flying all around and Johan is really going for it, when you’re headbanging like a maniac like on the awesome ‘The Strategy Of Fear’ or the tenebrous closer, ‘Them’, it doesn’t really feel right to call this anything else other than death metal, or even more specifically death’n’roll, a term usually attributed to the mighty Entombed, and hey, the aforementioned ‘The Strategy Of Fear’ could well be on one of their more atypical records such as ‘Same Difference’. Oh, and who is that guest, roaring on that ‘Them’ track? That’s right, our beloved and much missed L-G Petrov himself. Also on that same track, Örjan Örnkloo, an essential part of the oft-underrated, equally impossible to classify Misery Loves Co. and keyboardist for In Flames for over two decades, also pops up with some extra noise, as if to further reinforce the point that Nine have their fingers in a whole bunch of extreme pies.

Furthermore, what you get from the whole of the album isn’t just punk fury and death metal weight, not to mention all them rock’n’roll grooves. No, Nine know (or knew, unfortunately, as the band’s last release is from 2007 and they’ve been formally inactive since 2013) how to pace themselves and they were fully aware that, as those farming nutters in The Inspector Cluzo so eloquently explained during a gig of theirs I saw recently, “music needs silence”. That’s how you get, for example, a curveball like ‘Anxiety Report’ halfway through, a mellower, more melancholic, but quite sinister centrepiece to the album, almost epic in feel. Guitarist Oskar Ekman played bass in morose indie rockers Last Days Of April (also a severely overlooked band I might dig up sometime), which goes some way to explain this melodic sensibility and the knack for a bittersweet hook to grab you at exactly the right time.

As I mentioned before, it’s worth it to explore the whole discography of this lot, as there are great songs in every album, but not only have I just done a Discography Deep Dive a few days ago, ‘Killing Angels’ is the one that gets this all-genres-in-one-super-effective-shouty-whole balance thing perfectly right. And for a record reaching its 20th anniversary (did I mention it’s from 2003?), it sounds fantastically current. You too will return to it a bunch once its sunk its hooks in you. Give it a shot.

Tracklist:
01. Inferno – 3:23
02. Euthanasia – 3:07
03. Watching The Train Go By – 3:23
04. The Strategy Of Fear - 3:22
05. Discontent O.D. - 3:37
06. The End - 3:10
07. Anxiety Report - 5:53
08. Cardiac Arrest - 4:16
09. 33 - 3:42
10. Them - 4:39