Maybe that’s a little over the top, but you’d think they were, given the state of overheated enthusiasm that comes steaming off every pen that writes about them and every mouth that speaks their name. The Alps have grown up quickly, moulding their Nirvana fetishes into something much more original and rocking harder and harder with every show. With so much hype and excitement around them, it’s inevitable that Everything Is won’t live up to the beliefs around them. Only, it does. Apart from the Cobain-pilfering Not Everyone, Everything Is has taken their obvious love of grunge and moved it forward, creating something that stands with a toe in the sea of angst guitar troubles and a fist punching a sky full of blistering bass-ripping, skin-pounding stormers. It’s an album as powerfully intense as a brakeless juggernaut. It throbs through the likes of their jaw-dropping debut Cosmopolitan and the surging Unsatisfied. It gasps into a stripped and tender Behind Your Eyes. It races on into the enormous Ironside, the insistent Shot Down and the anthemic title track. Then breathless and bursting, it finally plunges headlong over a cliff with the closing supernova of Southern Cross. It is, against the odds and the inevitable pressures of expectation, the finest debut of the year. Crack out the test tubes and unpack the incense, Nine Black Alps might just be all the things we want them to be. | 
