Comets On Fire – Avatar (Sub-Pop)

Well the tracks here centred around the drummer’s new line in piano prog-balladry take a little getting used to, but holy wow, the rest of this album rocks like the sun making out with the moon! Air guitar album of the century thus far! Unashamedly classic rawk in approach, ‘Avatar’ cuts back considerably on the Japanese-psyche wormhole mentalism that fuelled previous Comets material, with defiantly shiny production and clean guitar lines and vocals in the foreground, the echo and feedback tastefully augmenting the songs n’ solos rather than swamping them. So what have these dudes stepped up to the plate with now that the inevitable fourth album ‘maturity’ has denied them their noise-chaos…? Well baton down the hatches punks, cos we’re talking Blue Oyster Cult, Mahavishnu Orchestra, post-Syd/pre-Dark Side Floyd, the Allman Bros, Rush(??), more Blue Oyster Cult. Basically, Comets would very much like to make clear that they are in no uncertain terms a ROCK BAND, they have moustaches, they know their scales and practice 8 hours a day and they mean fucking business.

Which is not to say that’s the whole story, cos there’s a ton of joy going on here beyond the “Psyche weirdoes grow up, become retrogressive rockists!” line that’s gonna dominate in all the 250 word reviews of ‘Avatar’ that’ll see print this month; ‘Holy Teeth’ and ‘Dogwood Rust’ still rock it wild and woolly like the lava-spewing bastards of old, Noel Harmonson is more then ever exploring some truly weird sounds on his echoplex/effects even if they’re now creeping in around the corners rather than dominating. ‘Sour Smoke’ kicks into a truly peculiar kinda Kraut/prog/tropicalia groove that’ll have the Skynyd fans pretty flummoxed, and hey, even drummer-boy’s dramatics are pretty fucking astonishingly gigantic on ‘Lucifer’s Memory’.

So chalk ‘Avatar’ up as an exquisitely SUCCESSFUL consolidation of everything a band should be doing as they stumble toward mid-career, a master-class in how to put in the effort to make a fucking GOOD rock album in the old-fashioned sense without losing momentum or sucking, an album which will get the thumbs up from crazed headbangers, underground cognescenti, reviewers and guitar shop bores alike and… hell, this just rules, ok? Now let’s all hit the hay.

ENTER THE SMOKE

I’m in the midst of a lot of to-ing and fro-ing leading to my moving to London at the moment, so a warning in advance that updates here could be few and far between in the near future… or who knows, maybe circumstances will allow me to make it allow to see Awesome Colour, XBXRX & Bood On The Wall and Noxagt & Todd in the capital over the next 10 days, and I’ll be able to post lots of over-excitable things about those!

But to tide you over in the meantime, I’m hopefully gonna put up some thoughts on a few new (yes, new) albums that have recently come my way (er, by which I mean bought cheap re-sold promos, essentially).

Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabete – In the Heart of the Moon (World Circuit)

I heard my mum playing this the other day, and decided it was so lovely I was duty-bound to steal it immediately. Ali Farka Toure, as you might recall, is that extremely well regarded West African guitarist who died a couple of months ago. The obituaries in the posh papers noted that his style of music was fairly unique, and was often likened to an African equivalent of the blues. They also portrayed him as a righteous and big-hearted dude who had spent a lifetime travelling, playing and honing his craft the old fashioned way, and made myself and no doubt many others feel a bit guilty for not knowing who the hell he was, and never taking the time to particularly care.

But here I am, hanging out and playing “In the Heart of the Moon” (what a title!) for the second or third time today, drawn to it not by the fuzzy cover art or it’s teeth-grinding designation as (spit) ‘world music’, or by the desire to say “hark at me readers, I’m listening to music from Africa!”, or even my vague familiarity with the reputation of the performers… simply by the fact that it was coming out of the stereo, and it sounded fucking great.

Entirely instrumental and featuring Toure on guitar and Diabete on kora (a kind of African harp?), “In the Heart of the Moon” is an album of rare beauty, conveying as deep a sense of serenity as I have ever heard from recorded music. Betraying scarcely a hint of the stylistic clichés that decades of well-intentioned misrepresentation have led us to associate with African music, it instead puts me in mind of medieval lute / lyre music, laidback boogie/blues instrumentals, Japanese Koto playing, post-Fahey/Takoma acoustic guitar stylings and any other tradition you care to name in which a couple of solemn and accomplished string players can be pictured strolling out onto the porch of an evening, abandoning all egos, quests and agendas at the door, staring at the landscape ahead of them and just playing gentle, organic and heart-stoppingly melodious music, weaving around and complementing each other’s sounds, caring only for the simple joy of a good tune played well, until the sun rises.

Chances are most of the people in the West who hear this disc will be insufferable world music ponces of one variety of another, which is a damn shame, as it is blessed with an appeal that stretches way beyond that particular ghetto. Dragging things back to my own stomping ground, I can whole-heartedly commend it as essential listening to any admirers of Ben Chasny, Jerry Garcia, Mississippi John Hurt or the mellower moments of Fahey and Robbie Basho who feel like taking a daring leap across the continental divide.

In fact, hell, forget that lot - I’d whole-heartedly commend it as essential listening to my mum, your mum and everyone else’s mum too –I’ll readily admit to being pretty much entirely ignorant of the musical culture these guys have emerged from, but one thing I do know is that it would take a real idiot not to appreciate music this selflessly and undemandingly beautiful.

(Reappraisal:

Actually that Dead C collection isn’t quite as bad as I made out a few posts back; still not exactly my favouritest band ever, but there’s some pretty fantastic stuff on the second disc.)