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.