The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 1.

As I write, a copy of Comet Gain’s first album in seven years is awaiting collection from the post office. (That's not a picture of it above, obvs.) By this stage, the cycle of anticipation has doubled back on itself and I’m scarcely anticipating it at all. After so many years, so much obsession and projection and heartache and weird, creepy sound-ownership poured into their previous LPs, the existence of a new one to sit alongside those tablets of the lore just seems ridiculous. Whatever is on it, it will disappoint, initially at least. It will take time for it to work its way into the pantheon. It will take beer and stubbed toes and hungover journeys to work. It will get there eventually.

As ‘The Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ sits in the sorting office then, the time seems nigh for me to step up and launch into my Big Comet Gain Post. Think of it as an attempt to examine the way this sporadically active British rock band – whose name you could probably yell in a busy record shop anywhere in the world without eliciting a glimmer of recognition – have infiltrated my life and thought to such a degree over the past decade that… well, I don’t even know how to end that sentence. A lot of drunken walks home, a lot of nights crammed into insalubrious music venues, a lot of personal upsets and snap decisions, a lot of rambling letters and purchases of records and books and movie tickets, would all have been very different without the music of Comet Gain. And, in general, they’d have been a lot less fucking good too, I’d wager.

I’m afraid you’re going to have to bear with me quite a bit on this one. It’s gonna be split into several sections, and I’m going to try to present information and thoughts and visuals in a way that’s roughly in line with when I acquired them. This band were very mysterious to me for a long time, before I eventually had the good fortune to find myself living in a city where they were playing semi-regular gigs, and for a lot of their fans I’d imagine they are mysterious still. More than is usually considered sensible these days, they seem like a band still dedicated to forcing their way to immortality via blurry photos, random pronouncements, distant rumours and general uncertainty, and that’s something I’d like to try to reflect.

So hey, let’s take this in numbered sections, with quotes, like a H.P. Lovecraft story or something, shall we? Yeah, that sounds like fun.

I.

“We started as a joke and idea, we played broken songs on broken amps and cardboard drums and it never got much more professional. We believed in obsolete things and passionate hearts and still do and made these records from our hearts to yours for whatever it was and still is and could be. Never die, up the workers and all that. DCF”

- sleeve note, ‘Broken Record Prayers’ compilation, 2009

Nobody told me to listen to Comet Gain. I never heard them on the radio, or read about them in the press. Even ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, whose shambolically utopian post-riot grrl aesthetic agenda and nexus of editorial/band member allegiances would you’d think have provided the perfect vehicle for plentiful Comet Gain coverage, somehow forgot to tell me about them. Instead, my discovery of the band was wholly accidental, mediated through my pre-download era trawling of chain store clearout bins, in search of something, anything that might be worth listening to.

Somewhere between the age of about eighteen and twenty, whilst indulging in this unsavoury, vulture-like activity, I found myself in the middle of an unexpectedly fucking brilliant clearance sale in the Brighton branch of Borders. Subsequently, I have learned that none other than CTCL editor Everett True spent some time working in a managerial capacity at Borders (this branch, presumably), following his departure from the mainstream music press and prior to his founding of the aforementioned publication. Thus it’s my theory that what I was actually experiencing here was the shop’s attempt to rid itself of all the unsellable stock he’d ordered in. But regardless – the fact is that for a poor kid without access to even dial-up internet, the chance to actually pick up discs by the mysterioso likes of Flying Saucer Attack, The Make Up and The 13th Floor Elevators for £1 a pop was extremely exciting.

And amongst their number… COMET GAIN. What the hell is that? Never heard of ‘em. WHAT a great name a band though, and the cover (some sort of endlessly photocopied still from a Jean Luc Godard movie chopped up inside big yellow and orange boxes or something) looked cool as shit, so I went for it.



I guess with a name like that I naturally assumed they’d be a psychedelic band of some kind. Maybe some Stereolab kinda deal. Y’know, like they were probably jamming in the studio and were all like ‘uh, so chaps, I think we need a name’, and they got it from one of their pedals, or a knob on a weird Japanese reverb unit or something. In hindsight, I suspect this name origin story is about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get. In fact, I’d venture to suggest that the sort of muso gear-nerd fetishism that an assumption like that might imply is exactly the kind of thing Comet Gain stand against. Something they exist to spit in the face of, even! I doubt David Feck even knows the name of the single rusty stomp-box he plugs his Japanese Rickenbacker copy into on-stage. And that’s something to be proud of, damn it! I mean, d’you think Swell Maps or The Clean or The Raincoats had time to caress their fucking mass-produced electronic gizmos and build fucking pedalboards whilst they were busy wringing out the raw energy of youth that was running through their bones, capturing it in the form of random, frantic eternal racket before it soured, dedicating every second to feeling autonomous and alive…? (That’s a rhetorical question - don't answer it.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So yeah: I still don’t know why they’re called Comet Gain. But it’s still a great name. And on the back of this CD, which was called ‘Tigertown Pictures’, on a label called ‘Where It’s At Is Where You Are’ Records, there’s a tiny little square of faces – too small to really make out much detail -introducing the members of the band. Being the sad bastard I am, I probably scrutinised this in detail before I even put the CD on. ‘Kay’ – identifiable from her picture as female and Asian – played bass. ‘Rachel’ did ‘vox’. Some bloke I can’t remember the name of played the drums. Everything else was the remit of one ‘d. christian’ (male, no caps), who also took all the songwriting credits. I was sorta annoyed that this was a band with girls in, and yet the bloke had written all the songs and basically done everything. I was like that back then.

I can’t clearly remember what my first impressions were when I put ‘Tigertown Pictures’ on. I know it wasn’t an instant hit – I remember finding its sound thin and headachey and generally off-putting. But back in those days, you paid your money and took yr choice, y’know, so I kept putting the CD on regardless, and eventually it must have clicked. I remember thinking ‘oh, right, they’re an indie band’ – ‘indie’ in the sense that The Yummy Fur or Boyracer were ‘indie’ that is – scratchy and murky, with fluffed lyrics that you can’t quite hear properly, but with a certain undeniable passion about what they’re doing that keeps you listening regardless. And a certain fury too. Yeah, that was the hook for me maybe.

II.

The first Comet Gain song that really made an impression on me was ‘Record Collection’, the opener on ‘Tigertown Pictures’. Bloody hell, I thought, they may be an indie band, but they’re the most furious indie band I’ve heard in my life. The metallic clang of that guitars, the ranting, unguarded vocal delivery… the only thing in my limited musical vocabulary I could really compare this sort of fury to was Shellac’s ‘Prayer to God’. Even though it’s not very much like it at all, nothing else within my reach really seemed an apt reference point.

In essence, the song is a simple-bordering-on-dumb idea that just about any other band in the world would probably have played out as a tongue-in-cheek mess-around – a chorus declaring “I don’t wanna hear your record collection in my brain anymore”, contrasted with verses in which the singer lists songs and artists he can’t face anymore, presumably because they remind him of time spent with his ex. Y’know, you can imagine it can’t you – a singsong-y girl group beat and a bunch of eyebrow raising cultural reference points. Fair enough. The situation is clearly no fucking joke for d.christian however, his ripped-to-fuck guitar constantly lunging ahead of the beat and having to double back on itself as he launches into a semi-improvised tirade of startling venom, declaring that “all musicians are a disgrace, disfigured, misinformed and rotten!” and “rock n’ roll’s a cancer in my lungs!”, in-between spitting out his rejection of “spiked guitars and Eno produced shit!”.

As you might expect, the song’s a bit of a mess, a kind of tantrum-like outburst that feels like it’s been pieced together haphazardly from several takes. The band rarely revisit it live, and you probably won’t listen to my Soundcloud upload and be blown away or anything. But for a first-time listener unaccustomed to the ways of this band, something about it was fairly extraordinary. Something about the way this ‘d.christian’ throws caution to the wind in his vocal delivery, rejecting the slurs and sneers and mumbles expected of an ‘indie’ vocalist, as he instead tries to hurl his cracked, white-boy voice in the direction of the kind of catharsis an American soul singer might pull out of the this material, straining to hit notes his lungs can’t even conceive of, as if he’d stormed down to the studio (assuming this sonic disaster of an album ever saw the inside of a studio) straight after hurling said record collection at his lover’s tearful head.

There is something about ‘Record Collection’ that maybe gets to heart of why I started to relate to Comet Gain so strongly – mainly I think, the idea of a band that refused to write this stuff off as a joke, of a singer who wasn’t ashamed to admit that the idea of not being able to listen to The Beach Boys or Dexy’s Midnight Runners anymore wasn’t just a wistful ‘moving on’ experience, it was a fucking holocaust. It seemed a brave thing to admit, something we can all connect to to some extent, but would never be able to scream in song, putting our obsessions and weaknesses on display like that. Even ten years ago, I could see what an excessive, lunatic thing the song essentially is, but can any of us music fans truly say we don’t get some kind of vicarious thrill of recognition from the uncertain voice after the fury has died down that repeats, “will you still love me tomorrow / when I show you the track of my tears?”, as the impotent, amp-scraping feedback fades away behind him? At that point I think, the connection was made.

Labels: Comet Gain