The Ninth Wave - 'Piece and Pound Coins'
You never quite know what you’re going to get with a new song from The Ninth Wave. One single could be laced with a heavy dose of distorted bass and organ without much room for air, the next could be a heartfelt and sparse number filled to the brim with emotion. The one constant with each release is they never fail to be brilliant in their own way and whilst wildly different, they all carry the familiar DNA of a Ninth Wave song.
Latest arrival ‘Piece and Pound Coins’ has been swirling around my head for the last four or five days since its release and I’ve not quite known how to do it justice with words since that first listen. It’s a moving and deeply personal account of the loss of a dear friend of singer Haydn Park-Patterson and it brings back a wave of memories of the tragic loss of The Lapelles frontman Gary Watson back in 2016.
Positioning the signature synth/keys behind the curtain and pointing the spotlight on Park-Patterson’s vocals it allows for the focus and attention on an extraordinary vocal performance. You can hear the mixture of feelings rearing their head throughout the song and it’s a powerful display of the many stages of grief. The more I listen to the song, the more it feels like the vocals and instrumental sections of the songs started off on their own journeys, but they manage to prop each other up and coexist to create beauty from tragedy.
The quartet feel like veterans of the Glasgow scene now when the reality is they’ve just packed a hell of a lot into a short space of time with no stopping to put their feet up. That’s not likely to change any time soon either as the band are on a UK tour next month and will follow this release with their second LP, the follow-up to their 2019 debut ‘Infancy,’ at some stage next year.
Words by Richard Cobb