Their next album, titled GRACE, will be released on the 2nd of November 2022, and will kick off a nationwide tour that same month, which will end in a grand finale to be played on the 24th of December 2022. They also announced the commencement of preorders being taken (through the fanclub only) for the limited edition of their new album, which will include all 10 tracks of the album on a CD, along with a Bluray disc containing the album’s two music videos along with the entirety of their finale performance for the Brutal Revelation tour this past spring.
As if that weren’t enough great news for one day, they also unveiled their newest music video, which promotes the last track on their new album.
Grace
The album name is in uppercase, while the title track is in lowercase. And yes, it does share the name of a compilation album they did a limited release for back in 2016, but this deeply-significant word and concept clearly deserved a revival.
One of Saga’s influences going way back was Jeff Buckley’s album Grace, and just last year for their 17th Anniversary live, in which they played the entirety of their GEMINI album, they played the Buckley track Grace in the livehouse while fans were still finding their seats and waiting for the concert to start. I’ve made no secret over the years of how much I love and have been inspired by ALICE NINE.’s album GEMINI so being able to watch that performance as it happened, even from afar, was in all honesty a dream come true for me. It was bliss. That being said, I am also a fan of the album Grace, which I started listening to because of the fact that Saga blogged about it years ago, and it’s continued to influence me over the years as well. Thanks, Saga! 🙂
I don’t know if the new album title (or the title of this lead track) had already been decided, even back then, but I thought that was a beautiful connection. A little premonition of what was to come, back when Saga first tweeted a hint that a very significant album for ALICE NINE. was on the horizon.
Grace is a Saga composition, and one that has been in the works since early 2020, though Saga tweeted to say that it wasn’t originally meant to be released as an ALICE NINE. song, which is why there are vestiges of Saga in it (that is, Saga sang extensive harmonies with Show in it). I’ve included the translated tweets below. If you compare the still cover image used on Funeral to that of Grace before you watch the video, you’ll note that Funeral features only Show on it, while Grace features a still of the entire band mid-playing. That contrast in initial presentation alone in the context of the album is very interesting. But the songs themselves also sound incredibly different in feel and atmosphere. I’ve already written at length about how much I love Funeral, so I’ll just get right into my love for Grace.
March 31st 2020 In times like this I make songs I’m making one right now
By the way, this isn’t related to the album or to the band (Saga uploaded a clip of the song-in-progress, which we now know is Grace, and was referring to their album NIGHTLESS CITY EDEN)
September 9th 2022 I’ve had Grace since then, you know. I had neither the intention of making it the lead track of the album nor of doing it with the band, but That’s why, as a sort of relic, I’m singing in it.
As as soon as you press play, it is immediately apparent that Grace is tied to a classic, well-loved ALICE NINE. song: the beautiful name.
A prélude, maybe, or else a companion piece, an homage.
Is this perhaps the long-held idea that Saga mentioned in the last album-related tweet? An idea that Saga then began making a reality in early 2020? We’ll have to wait for interviews and talk events to learn more.
With the long, quiet lead-in, the anticipation builds to an incredible point; I wonder if the long lead-in and outro is just for the music video, or whether all eight minutes are part of the recording on the album proper. Grace is wonderfully layered and complex with a beautiful, uplifting melody; those harmonies between Show and Saga feel like an updraft, continually pulling the song skyward.
Grace is expansive, but it takes its time to unfold.
No rushing. A steady march to take in the glorious scale of the music.
The way that the music bursts with light at 5:47 is nothing short of magnificent.
I am in awe.
This song is a thing of beauty and grace.
The アリス九號.
And in the video, at the end, they all huddle under furs, snow falling over them, waiting for the arrival of spring. Which, of course, is their joy-filled classic, the beautiful name.
The end of the voyage and the day to be graced.
Incorporating lots of slow-motion shots, along with the lengthy intro and outro ending on a shot of a door standing before an ocean, the music video further underscores the epic scale of the music.
Show revealed in a tweet that 武瑠 Takeru (through Akubi Inc Tokyo) was the artistic director of this music video, following his previous work on their CYAN video released in the summer of 2020. Just like the last time, 武瑠 Takeru framed them in a way that hadn’t really been done before. There is something to be said for having a fan take the reins!
Show, September 9th 2022 “Grace” Into irreplaceable days, we load love
I can’t say everything I want to about all the thoughts I have, so please let me talk about them another time. Thank you.
武瑠 Takeru, September 10th 2022 Following CYAN, I’ve been afforded the chance to produce an MV. “The アリス九號.” as a theme was big here, so the idea took some time to think of, but the slow motion staging opened up the creative path in one go. As did the homage to a past song. Once again, congratulations on your 18th anniversary.
Show replied again to Takeru this morning to say, very warmly,
“While busy with an overseas live and his own activities, I got a deep impression from Takeru, who didn’t compromise one bit on the direction of the project or MV. I’m truly grateful he undertook it with us.“
They managed to get trending on Twitter as well both before and after their live, which was all the more significant due to the fact that it coincided with the appearance of the harvest moon. Auspicious.
Grace is the sort of song that doesn’t need you to fully understand it right away. It is the type of song that sounds better with each listen, becoming fuller with each new detail of the sound strata you take notice of. I am going to be very excited to delve into the minutia of the lyrics on release day. Grace must have been spectacular to hear live, and I’m sure it will just become more beautiful as it is played and listened to, as time goes on. A classic in the making.
I think it may also be significant that in the 18th anniversary live, they played Waterfall just before Grace, a song which leads the listener into the beautiful name… those three songs together form quite a breathtaking flow of emotion. I love that they are all being woven together that way. I think it may also be safe to think, at this point, that “Grace” is the beautiful name.
Another element in the アリス九號. mythology given shape.
For the moment though, that’s just my own personal interpretation. We’ll have to wait and see whether they expound on this in interviews and comments in the coming weeks and months. Slowly, the world their music inhabits deepens, unfolds further.
As a longtime fan, I am so proud of them, and am very much looking forward to listening to the entire album, start to finish, when it comes out in two months.
This soundscape, this mindscape is worth the wait.
Saga is well-versed in the art of building anticipation.
With just over a week to go until their 18th anniversary live, Saga tweeted to reveal another detail regarding their next, as-yet-unnamed album, nearly a year to the day after first teasing the news that they were about to embark upon the creation of another deeply significant ALICE NINE. album. The very fact that they aren’t rushing with this release already marks it as being something different from usual, and I have no doubt that the wait is going to make it all the better, more meaningful.
For such a small message, the tweet manages to make a spectacular reveal. Not only did Saga create yet another song suite like their first groundbreaking experiment GEMINI, the latter half of this nearly twelve minute suite makes use of an idea that Saga had been holding on to for over ten years. What was the long-incubating idea? A melody? A sound texture? A technique?
沙我三昧！╰(*´︶`*)╯
I can only imagine, and am so very excited to find out, in time.
August 29th, 2021. Thank you for 17th theatre While I do think that GEMINI is a work that each person has an emotional attachment to, it is, as you might expect, an album with particularly deep significance for ALICE NINE.
It’s unclear whether it will surpass GEMINI However I get the sense that the time has come Where we must create an opus that wholly reveals Everything that the band is.
August 31st, 2022. Although a year has gone by, It’s unclear whether it surpassed GEMINI, but I created a song suite this time that approaches twelve minutes in length with an idea that just about surpasses GEMINI jammed into it The latter part of the song suite is an idea from over ten years ago
I don’t remember the true beginning of the events that followed, but I have a sense that I had spent the previous day at work. Where I worked was a strangely vertical, cramped area above someone’s rather gargantuan living room. I recognized the living room. It was either a very strange imagining of the living room of someone I grew up with, or it was a living room that I used to dream about as a child. Either way, my workstation was above this living room, which had a chasm in the centre of it. I never saw the chasm, I just had the very profound sense that it was there, and that that was why we kept our gazes high or level, and had to use things like ledges, bridges, and rope-swings to get from one side of the living room to the other. When I was in that lower, living room space, I felt like I was a kid again, interacting with other kids. Moving around and across the living room with trepidation, gravity, and a paradoxical ease that I may not felt as an adult. There, I played video games with the other kids whenever we reached the TV — more than likely, we were playing on N64, Dreamcast, or PlayStation, but I don’t remember any specific game or console from the dream. Up some steep, carpeted, curving stairs, was my cramped, carpeted workspace, with other coworkers. I didn’t recognize any of them, and maybe that is simply because I didn’t truly interact with any of them in the dream.
It was a new day.
It seems that I lived with my parents, or at least near enough to them that I could go over in the morning before work and ask if I could drive one of their four cars to my office. This is strange for two reasons: I do not currently and have never had a driver’s licence, and they have never had more than one car at any given time. To make matters stranger, after accepting, my parents told me to take the car “at the end”, a vintage vehicle, newly restored and looking pristine.
I protested, but they insisted.
Off we went to work — and I do mean “we”. My parents also insisted on coming along. I’m not certain what the rationale was, but when we arrived, my mother wanted to have a look around and, of course, chat with anyone in the vicinity. I felt very stressed, knowing this, but for whatever reason I had truly needed to borrow a car to get to work that morning, so I mustered up patience and tried to get on with things. Sure enough, as soon as we’d parked and gotten out of the car, she began chatting with everyone we passed, though thankfully, it seemed, not with anyone I worked for or with directly. From the outside, my office appeared to be a trailer, a truck, or a luxurious shipping container — that was the sense I had, even though I never looked at it directly during the dream. It seemed to have some sort of vertical protuberance, like a tower, jutting out of it. This small-seeming exterior of course belied the fact that the fully-carpeted interior contained an upper floor that served as an office for who-knows-how-many workers or companies, an enormous split-level main floor that served as the house of someone I had been friends or acquaintances with as a child, and in the centre of all of that (of course) a fucking abyss.
No big deal.
My mother wanted to come into the office and attempted to do so, despite my protests.
The next thing I remember is that I was just outside the back of a Winners, and that it was winter — or at least cold enough for me to have shrugged into what seemed to be a new coat before walking over. I didn’t work there. Nevertheless, I went through the back door — me and a couple pushing a cat in a coat in a stroller. I found the sight both endearing and bizarre. Though I did not seem to find it unusual to be entering the store from the nearly-unmarked back. The room that we found ourselves in was well-lit, but had strange dimensions, with a winding foot path cut through piles and stacks of children’s toys, mainly. The couple wheeled over to a miniature aisle (child-height) in order to look through new clothes for their curiously-calm cat.
In the top-left corner of the room, there was a very small flat escalator, moving in an oval around that small section of the room; a loop with no apparent purpose other than perhaps to entertain children and keep them in one place. I got on it and when I did, I was at such an angle that I could look through a large window set into that back corner, looking down into the rest of the store, which strangely seemed to have been built continually downward, below ground level. From that vantage point, I also noticed that down below the window there was a separate conveyor belt that you could get on in order to be taken down there.
So I got the hell on it.
Down below was a large, mostly empty atrium of sorts, with a few patrons passing through it, mainly crossing from doors and hallways at opposite ends of the room. I turned away from the conveyor belt and followed a rather dark corridor leading back from where the upper-level window had been.
The next thing I remember was being in my aunt ’s living room, though a very strange version of it. She’s the one that used to babysit me and make me Delicate Cookies when I was a kid living in Newfoundland; still one of the best recipes in my collection. I don’t get the sense that she looked like herself in the dream, but I knew instinctively that it was her. I was with at least one other person — my brother, maybe, but I can’t remember who it was. In her house the living room, dining room, and kitchen are all on the same level, with a door separating the living room from the two other spaces. In the dream version of her house, the living room and darkened dining room were on the bottom level, and then walking up a small set of stairs took you to a small, purposeless landing, where you could take another small set of stairs to reach the kitchen at the top. It was all open plan.
In reality, she is still sound of mind and reasonably healthy, physically, but in the dream, she seemed confused and kept putting things in unusual places. At one point, she startled when I came near her and explained that she’d actually been sleepwalking the whole time. I felt unnerved. The house was very dark, all the curtains drawn; the only light that had been on had been the one above the stove. She led me and whoever I was with away from the kitchen, over toward a set of double doors. Beyond them, it was broad daylight, and other relatives were sitting on the patio chatting and laughing as if nothing had been amiss.
I sat and stayed for a while, but then suddenly I was walking out into another large atrium, brightly-lit and far more cavernous than the one at Winners had been. I recognized this place; much like the living room abyss, this was a location I had dreamt of more than once in my childhood.
It was the McDonald’s corporate headquarters, it was the 90s again, and a gaggle of families were there with their children, sitting at the heavy, restaurant-style tables scattered throughout the atrium, eating cake. Some sort of celebration was underway, but we had likely arrived just as it was winding down.
My parents led me and my brother through that carpeted main hall without stopping for cake.
We were little kids again. Six and three.
One section of that main hall had been walled off in glass or plastic barriers and filled with child-size tables and chairs so that kids could mingle freely on the inside while their parents watched on the outside.
For some reason this detail stuck out in my mind: one kid in a dress, sitting on a chair, shoes just barely touching the carpeted floor, eating cake.
I don’t know what my parents were looking for, but it clearly wasn’t cake.
They led us all the way over to the other side of the atrium, where barely anyone had chosen to sit, and then into a corridor. It was carpeted too, and felt both too-clean and still-grimy, the way old airports tend to when they don’t get the foot traffic they used to. It was too quiet back there, and I started to feel uncomfortable.
Then my little brother and I were alone.
I don’t know why, just that we were.
So we had to be brave — I had to be brave.
I took my brother’s hand and started to walk back through the corridor we were in, though I had no idea where we were going, or how to find our parents again. I tried not to let my fear show. A few people passed us, but we weren’t to talk to strangers, and curiously, they paid us no mind. Finally, after wandering through several corridors without success, we came upon a glass door that led into a unlit room. My little brother opened it cautiously, and together we stepped just inside, the both of us holding the door ajar. The light from the corridor gave us some sense of what was in there. To our left were pools of water, the water running and overflowing gently into each one. I didn’t like being in the dark, but there was something strangely calming about the dark pools of water, like they were the beginnings of an aquatic garden.
My little brother tightened his grip on my hand, and I looked over at him quizzically.
Which is when my eyes caught on the sight that had alarmed him.
Eyes.
Countless eyes flashing back at us from the other side of the room, the humanoid figures that belonged to them shrouded in shadow.
A cry caught in my throat, and holding even more firmly to my little brother’s hand, I pulled him back from the room into the hallway, the glass door shutting behind us as we broke into a run, going back the way we had come.
Or at least I assumed we were heading back the way we had come.
We were utterly lost, fear sharpening our reflexes and making our panicked minds go fuzzy.
At last, we ran into another room, this one lit from above by pot lights and filled with rows of large, oval tables, some sections of the room fenced off with plain chain-link panels. But there they were: our parents.
Sitting at one of the tables and eating some sort of meal — though not cake.
The rest of the room was conspicuously empty, and my hackles rose.
My parents seemed rather relaxed and unbothered, and somehow I knew that their food had been laced with a drug of some kind.
We needed to leave, all four of us, as quickly as possible.
Something told me that the eyes that had stared back at us from the depths of that darkened water-garden had been adults like our parents at some point, having been whisked away to be experimented upon after having ingested the tainted food. I kept urging our parents to follow us and leave, but they didn’t have any real sense of urgency. They were humouring me.
I kept hold of my little brother’s hand, and we led the way, but the hallway was darker coming back out of the room than it had been going in, and we slipped off into a side passage where I hoped we could avoid notice so that our parents wouldn’t be captured. This new corridor’s walls were made of curving glass, and utterly dark; I thought there might be some sort of liquid on the other side of them, but I couldn’t be certain. The floor was a wooden boardwalk suspended in water and lit dimly from below. Water sloshed up over the wood, the walkway bobbing and swaying, as we made our way across.
My brother and I were so busy looking at our feet to make sure we were walking on the planks of wood and not getting our little feet caught in the watery spaces between them, that we didn’t notice the researcher’s approach until it was too late.
From the depths of the snaking, eerily-lit corridor, a figure wearing a full diving outfit, complete with glass and metal bubble helmet came lunging toward us, and —
I woke up.
I woke up to Scout giving me a quizzical look from the end of the bed, because I’d just emerged from a frankendream and probably seemed rather flustered and sweaty. I’m not actually certain when I fell asleep, but given that the dream-turned-nightmare went four levels deep, I have to assume I was under the influence of the stranger parts of my subconscious for a good hour or two.
Not long after that, I made myself presentable, gave Scout and early supper, and headed out to my brother’s house for a family dinner.
A dinner that featured a roast expertly-prepared by my brother’s girlfriend, sweet corn shucked by my brother and I (inexpertly, according to our very amused and somewhat exasperated father), and fried cod tongues, a belated birthday present for our mother, whose favourite food is exactly that.
As soon as I got in the door, though, I was greeted by two cardboard boxes: one filled with some LPs from my mom’s twenties, and one filled with tons of not-for-sale singles from her days as a radio DJ and morning show host that she’d been allowed to take home from work and keep. My father didn’t have any records, because instead of those, he’d been collecting 8-tracks and cassettes, all of which he’s long had converted to mp3 files. He seemed particularly delighted when we unearthed a single by The Alan Parsons Project (Side A: Eye In the Sky / Side B: Gemini), one of several bands, apparently, whose works he’d collected almost entirely on cassette.
I felt a little indignant about the fact that my parents used to listen to those sorts of bands but would always just put on soft rock radio stations at home instead of playing cassettes/records of albums that they personally collected. What gives?! Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the music on those stations. I just. Could have had more exposure to rock and albums made to be listened to as whole works of art much earlier — rather than simply listening to individual songs in isolation the way I did for most of my childhood.
The important thing, I suppose, is that I’m trying to work through a backlog of cool sonic journeys now, as an adult. And enjoying all the new ones that are coming out currently.
ALICE NINE.‘s as-yet-unnamed album will be one such epic sonic journey, I’m quite sure, especially given how cool the lead track Funeralis, and the passion that Saga currently seems to be pouring into the recording of said album, if the following tweet is anything to go by:
Half of the album has bass solos, I’m playing acoustic guitar the whole way through on I dunno how many songs, And I’m singing the chorus, rapping, growling, chanting, and doing backup vocals, so 😇 What’s my part now? 😇
I love Saga deeply. Reading that update made me so very happy. Let your passion and musical talent be unleashed even more! My ears, my mind, my heart, and my imagination are in for such a treat on release day! 楽しみだよ！♥
Ahem. Back to discussing the family dinner.
When my mom noticed the gold pearl ring on my finger, while we were chatting between supper and dessert, she expressed how pleased she was that I still wore it, because she was the one that gave it to me when I was twelve (it used to be hers), but then my father chimed in to explain something about it that I hadn’t known. Apparently it had originally housed a ruby (mom’s birthstone), but the ruby had fallen out long ago. When they’d been living in San Diego as newlyweds, they’d repaired it by having a pearl set in the ring instead. My mom insisted that the pearl had been chosen from a clam “at a Japanese garden”, while my father had insisted that the pearl had been bought “at Sea World”; maybe they were somehow referring to the same place. My little heirloom just got more mysterious.
After dessert (an incredibly rich wild blueberry custard pie that my brother’s girlfriend had picked up from the farmer’s market), me and my brother’s girlfriend exchanged an inordinate number of cat photos (…okay, I admit, it was mostly me showing her a ridiculous number of Scout photos), as well as some recommendations. She advised me to listen to Lizzo’s newest album Special (I did so while doing dishes this morning and it elevated the entire experience into something playful and joy-filled), while I advised her to listen to Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE in full because, where Lemonade was an album imbued with a confidence born out of anger and hurt, RENAISSANCE is an album filled with confidence couched in ease and trust — both powerful for different reasons. I also recommended she listen to the latest Billy Talent, Crisis of Faith (a rallying cry for social justice and compassion wrapped up in a truly hard-hitting, excellent sound), and to my brother, I recommended OFF-TRACK, Steve Neville‘s first solo album, created and recorded while he was undergoing cancer treatment, and you can hear all the humanity and raw emotion of that experience in the sound on the record. His sister Jacquie Neville and former bandmate Liam Jaeger participated in the creation of the album as well.
As an aside, the Neville siblings and Liam Jaeger were the founding members of The Balconies, one of my favourite bands, which happens to have been formed in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario. I never actually attended a show when Steve was part of the band (he left shortly before I managed to see them live), but I did attend the very last concert they played for their 10th Anniversary on February 3, 2018. It was stellar. They also released a final album at that point, “Show You“, that boasted recordings from 2012 — compared to their last two albums, Fast Motions and Rhonda, the sound on Show You was a lot more ‘garage’, and it featured earlier arrangements of songs that had come out on later albums. It was a great surprise release at the time, is what I’m saying, and I recommend it.
Just after dessert, my father made a big announcement: he’s going to be interviewed for an internet security podcast this week (he’s a big name in the white hat/security world). As someone who listens to a lot of podcasts during the workweek especially, I thought that was pretty cool and I’m looking forward to listening to the episode, even if a lot of the shop talk goes over my head.
If you’re curious, some of the podcasts I listen to regularly are ones like RISK! (since like 2014 or 2015 — incredible cross-section of true stories that are moving, hilarious, filthy, shocking, and thought-provoking), Getting Curious with JVN, Writers Ink, The Secret Room, What Was That Like, The Dark Paranormal, Financial Feminist, Hiroto’s Voicy, Kei’s SYNERGY twitcast, and lately, the back-catalogue of Supercontext, which I can already tell is going to become a bit of an obsession for me. I’m currently listening to a detailed examination of David Bowie’s Blackstar album, and then I’m on to an absolute treat… an in-depth analysis of one of my very favourite comics: volume one of the incomparable space opera, Saga (art by Fiona Staples, story by Brian K. Vaughn).
And no, it’s not a favourite just because it shares a name with Saga (though I love that link). It definitely delivers on the “space opera” front, has a diverse cast of characters (including plenty of queer ones), incredible art and witty writing, is steamy and filthy in all the right ways as well as being perfectly fluffy and romantic when the mood calls for it, will move you to tears, and then later make you laugh with its often dry and irreverent sense of humour.
It’s a favourite because the comic series itself, both visually and narratively, is stellar.
And I was today-years-old when I realized that they actually started releasing new issues of Saga again this January after a long hiatus; their 10th volume is going to be published this October, so I might wait to buy that and then start buying single issues after that. Yet another thing to get very excited about.
Okay, I’ll stop waxing lyrical about Saga2. （´・ω・｀）
It’s a long weekend, so I get to stay home and do more creating tomorrow. Back to writing and editing TE9…
