Last week, the dear old NME wrote a hilarious article about Nine Black Alps, suggesting they were the "least Mancunian-sounding" band to come from Manchester. Hur hur. Bless 'em.
Not that your reviewer has any problem with Nine Black Alps. Their single "Cosmopolitan" made the requisite boisterous noises and still makes regular appearances on this writer's overworked stereo, but that's not the point. If said organ insists on talking like they have some semblance of a handle on bands from the Mancunian hinterland who sound "nothing like" the city's accepted pop lineage (i.e The Smiths, The Roses, The Charlatans, New Order etc), then perhaps they should make the effort to widen their net to check out the likes of Quiet Loner and now LAST HARBOUR. Both are significant performers working broadly within the folk and Alt.Country genres who are making terrific albums like QL'S under-rated "Secret Ruler Of The Heart" and Last Harbour's new "Hold Fast, Pioneer."
Last Harbour are a quintet based around vocalist Kevin Craig and guitarist David Armes. They make relentlessly melancholic, largely beguilingly brilliant music threaded through with lashings of atmosphere and filmic possibilities, which come housed in sleeves involving deep forbidden Eastern European lakes. It's also safe to say that they REALLY sound absolutely nothing like anything that's previously come out of Manchester in the accepted sense.
The band have been lurking around the margins for a few years. They've previously been responsible for the rare 7" single "Hidden Songs", the French-released "An Empty Box Is My Heart" and last made their presence felt via 2002's "The Host Of WildCreatures". "Hold Fast, Pioneer" is their first full-length UK album release, though, and it's as good a place as any to get acquainted with their obsessive noir-ish blues.
Opener "China White" gives you some idea of the album's prevailing mood of sombre glory. It's a mordant, semi-acoustic beauty which smoulders with sweeping violin and shades of Tindersticks, Nick Cave and Lincoln. Craig sings moodily of "so many moths to a single flame" and - despite the title's connotation - the song is probably about impossible, forbidden passion rather than narcotic dalliance. Whatever, it's quite a scene-setter and unsettlingly beautiful.
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The melodrama rarely lets up thereafter. Songs like "Circle" and "Silver Leaves" are charged and malevolent affairs which hover drunkenly in the air, while the superficially prettier likes of "We Always Said" and "Your Verses" are ultimately every bit as threatening. The former is an organic, boy/girl duet with lonely, Blixa Bargeld-ish slide guitar and its' opening gambit is the impossibly fatalistic "We always said we'd be better off dead." Cripes. "Your Verses" also sells you a dummy: it kicks in with a brittle musical box melody before mutating into a sour scorned-woman blues of some vengeance and quality.
Occasionally, it can sail a little close to pastiche for comfort. The malicious sea-shanty that is "Johnny Row" is almost a Bad Seeds xerox, even though its' brooding quality is pervasive. However, there's no such problems with either the closing "The Ties That Bind" or the great "Serpents." The former is initially bitter, solemn and sparse, but flourishes to a climax by way of an oddly uplifting string-drenched coda, while "Serpents" is a superb, quasi-religious thing of some wonder, which opens with Craig warning "The sweetest fruit rots on the vine, the lowest creature fears the divine" and recalls solo-era Cathal Coughlan. Suitably favourably, I might add.
"Hold Fast, Pioneer" is troubled, intimate and sometimes painfully voyeuristic. It's also nearly uniformly excellent and proves Last Harbour's sad waters run deep and jealously hoard all manner of sunken treasure. Don't call the coastguard.
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