The 69 Eyes – I Survive
The 69 Eyes – I Survive
BLKIIBLK
Release date: 06/05/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
8/10
I Survive is what happens when a band spends thirty-seven years being told they’re finished and decides to take it personally.
Let me give you a quick scenario here. It’s 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen, and the Soviet Union is enduring one of the greatest corporate restructurings in world history, while somewhere in Finland — a nation dedicated enough to darkness to have effectively bred a secondary set of eyelids for the winter — five Finns decided the world was overdue for yet another goth rock band. The world didn’t ask for this, mind you, but the world rarely asks for anything remotely productive. It’s just sitting there in that leather jacket, smoking a cigarette, while you try to decide on a career path for yourself, and then dying alone in an abandoned warehouse, which seems like the most sensible course of action for The 69 Eyes.
Somehow, 37 years later, The 69 Eyes remain. Five original members. The same leather. That cigarette, no doubt still there; Finland, after all, would hardly allow its goth rock legends to go cold turkey in between shows. While the world around them has seen the rise and fall of numerous subcultures, the economic recession, two goths of nu-metal looking incredibly awkward in retrospect, the death of MySpace, the destruction of the entire music industry due to streaming services, and, recently, COVID-19, these Helsinki Vampires have simply continued, unchanged and unfazed. They have witnessed all their contemporaries either burnout spectacularly, go soft and retire to some remote village or country house to play acoustic tunes and talk about how “mature” their new stuff is, and The 69 Eyes did none of that. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that they have done quite the opposite of what every rock band does in its golden years. That’s not even an impressive career tactic; it’s survival instinct.
What needs to be stated is that these are not just a band who survived because of their dedication to the aesthetic. No, they have managed to survive because of it. The world has spent three decades trying to exterminate the existence of five darkly clad men who take themselves seriously in a way reminiscent of those vampire-sleaze-thunders. What is fascinating is that they have managed to respond to that by taking themselves more seriously with every passing year, almost like a man who places the same wager again after having already doubled down at the funeral. This is the man whose self-righteousness is often infuriating, but sometimes justified.
‘The Lost Boys’ from 2005 still remain their best-known tune, with the iconic music video made by Bam Margera in association with Jackass. This is a masterpiece of an effort. One can only imagine how it felt to be there in that cemetery next to a strip club, with both parties seeming not particularly upset about the close proximity of the venues. The band has issued 13 albums already, won multiple gold and platinum awards in their homeland where they are actually mainstream celebrities. ‘I Survive’ is an expression of their aesthetic logic, something that is impossible to describe in any normal terms and which is far too gothic for the children who weren’t expected to graduate, far too glamorous for anybody who has ever owned a New York Dolls record and lied about it, and far too rock’n’roll that you won’t need any explanation in the bar — but will need to provide one anyway because that’s you.
The EP opens with ‘I Survive,’ written in collaboration with Steve Stevens, the guitarist of Billy Idol. He’s a Grammy award winner and has contributed his unique skills towards making Top Gun a piece of actual art rather than what seemed to be a recruiting video for one of the military branches with the helmet problems. That combination of talents isn’t surprising at all; in fact, it feels somewhat inevitable. Stevens has brought his experience in riff architecture gained over the course of decades and paired it with Jyrki 69’s baritone so powerful and so deep it sounds like it was aged in the Finnish cellar alongside whatever it was they haven’t yet classified in that country. As a result, they’ve created a song that can thrive in the room where sweat is dripping from the ceiling and nobody is checking their phones because they’ve left them in the Uber they won’t bother with retrieving from wherever it left them.
The EP goes on with a cover of the legendary Thin Lizzy track titled ‘Cold Sweat.’ Written in 1983, the version released by The 69 Eyes has been around for over ten years now, after being buried for so long in one of the drawers containing the receipts from burning clubs and mysterious accidents of insurance companies. It has been produced by Erno Laitinen and mixed by Barry Pointer who made Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe look like natural disasters of music. In other words, there’s nothing revolutionary about this song. It has inhabited the original, like a water would fit into the vessel. The only vessel in this case is a Helsinki basement with plenty of expensive reverb inside it. And in the video of the song, there’s an appearance of Fernando Ribeiro, the main vocalist for Moonspell. That’s another gothic summit in disguise; those two musicians share an unspoken acknowledgement of each other’s status as veterans of the genre, having been fighting in this field long before the people writing the think-pieces about “the rock revival” could even formulate an opinion.
Finally, the EP ends with the song called ‘Devil’s Rose,’ featuring Ed Mundell, the former lead guitarist of Monster Magnet who spent almost two decades creating some of the darkest psychedelic rock from New Jersey, a state known for at least three different mafias and the likes of Bruce Springsteen. The contribution of Ed Mundell here is the element that wasn’t expected but that makes absolute sense for a reason. Namely, the Helsinki Vampires have always stood on the intersection of goth, glam, and something heavy, something dark, and Mundell was just the right person for this kind of job. As a consequence, this EP closes with such a magnificent track that there’s simply no other option — you’ll have to listen to the rest of the material, too. Four tracks is quite a small amount to go through.
Here’s something that this EP is not: it is not a revolutionary change in their style, a reinvention, or any kind of new direction. The band has not been trying to undermine its own mythos and engage in a post-modernist discussion with their older songs. Instead, it presents its audience with the music that should have sounded like this and that was done by these artists in a way that can hardly be expected even from people who have worked for thirty-seven years in this business. With the whole industry suffering from the identity crisis related to the fate of the electric guitars in modern music, that sounds quite rebellious now.
Tracklist:
1. I Survive (ft. Steve Stevens)
2. Cold Sweat
3. In The Misery
4. Devil’s Rose (ft. Ed Mundell)
