The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 2.

Apologies for the delay. I had some kinda busy-times space-filling posts prepared, but didn’t want to break the flow of the Comet Gain thing. I mean, ideally, I’d sit down and plough through the whole thing in one sitting, but life gets in the way. So kick back for a moment, light yr pipe, think back to earlier this month when you read my preceding post, and let’s see where we left off…

III.

The nearest thing to a Comet Gain press shot, circa 1999.

“This low-fi punk-pop band offers some nice moments on this disc, particularly on the ersatz Motown of "Dificient Love" and the straight-ahead punch of "Skinny Wolves," but the lack of finesse in guitarist David Christian's style gets a bit wearing after a while.”

– entire text of Allmusic.com review of ‘Tigertown Pictures’

“The only reason you play bad guitar is to get bad reactions – all this clone collective band shit, through boredom, contempt and NO IDEAS… our only ambition is just to die”

- Comet Gain - ‘Record Player’

My appreciation for the rest of ‘Tigertown Pictures’ grew more slowly. Even listening to it the other day, wandering around the streets whilst thinking about writing this article, I was noticing new connections in it, new patterns and details that were previously lost in the haze of the recording. It’s more than an earnest young lad such as my eighteen year old self could manage to take in in one go really - esoteric cultural reference points, blurry attempts at incompatible musical styles, big choruses and sentimental strumming crashing jagged fragments of noise and desperate, indecipherable poetry. What was all this stuff trying to convey? I dunno, but it definitely seemed to have something on its mind.

‘Jack Nance Hair’! Well, the special people can’t say no to a song with a name like that. This version you’ll note is very different to the one that turned up at the start of ‘Broken Record Prayers’ – murkier, more incoherent, with some words that may actually seek to reflect the sad fate of Mr. Nance, alongside other words that almost certainly do not. “I’m afraid she doesn’t know it, I’d like just once for her to show it” mutters David as the drum beat and guitar riff kick the song up to a faster tempo – a quietly heart-stopping moment, the first of many. Then there were the Rachel-voiced songs (‘Skinny Wolves’, ‘Hate Soul’) that seemed to draw on girl group and Motown tropes in an attempt to create a more upbeat pop atmosphere, resonant of breathless underground nightlife, random drunken passion and the like. I didn’t think those songs worked very well on this album, and I still don’t really. They seem a bit forced.

More befitting of the sprawling, cracked vibe of the whole affair is stuff like the lengthy ‘Transmission Lost’, verses full of mysterious references to “German documentary making” and “the rising of the poor after the war” opening up into an incessant chorus repeat (“running, running, running”) mixed over a barely decipherable spoken word monologue, culminating in breathless calls to “fight BACK” and “keep the Socialist dream alive”, expressed with an earnestness that can almost bring tears to my eyes as it pops up on my mp3 player midway down another street rotten with estate agents and betting shops.

(Soundcloud isn’t letting me upload songs from this album as friendly non-d/l streams today, so I guess I’ll just have to awkwardly give them to you to download instead – them’s the breaks.)

Transmission Lost.

Then there’s ‘Jaspar Johns’, a jagged post-punk temper tantrum that seems more intent on celebrating the artist’s drug habit than his work, morphing inexplicably into an extended quote from Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’, and ‘When You Come Back I’ll Feel Like Jesus Coming Off The Cross’, the absurdly overwrought sentiment of the title overcome by a slow, stately melody that belies the frantic belligerence of much of the rest of the record, and a line about somebody leaving home “with a suitcase full of mixtapes” - something I would literally be liable to do at around the time I acquired this album. A ‘gabba gabba we accept you’ lyric, like a not-so-covert nod to the similarly obsessed. Again, the first of many. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

One song that particularly stood out for me (I know this before archival research indicates I put it on a bunch of my own mixtapes around this time) was ‘The Ballad of the Arms of Cable Hogue’. Like the photocopied lobbycard cinematic moments plastered across Comet Gain’s records, there’s something inexplicably immortal about this song, something about the way the rather vague verses open up into a chorus vast enough to fill a Western skyline – “man on the telly, with a bullet in his belly”. That line immediately made me choke up, and still does – instant transportation to some darkened basement flat on a seafront somewhere, where the flickering image of the writhing, doomed cowboy on the screen mirrors the broader pain and confusion and terrible dramas going on all around it in the ‘real’ lives of the people who have brought us these strange, desperate songs. “Those that lose their lives / for the sake of the midnight hour”.

The Ballad of the Arms of Cable Hogue.

I’ve still not seen Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Arms of Cable Hogue’. I’d like to. If you were to collar me in the pub one night, I’d probably bullshit and pretend I know all about it. Try it some time if you know me in real life – I’ll probably have forgotten I wrote this paragraph.

Anyway, now seems a good juncture at which to talk about what a great singer Rachel Evans is. Usually, there are few roles in a rock group less distinguished than that of the lead singer who only sings on about a third of the songs and otherwise doesn’t do much, but anyone who’s listened to a Comet Gain record, or seen them on stage, will know what an inadequate summation of her contribution the band that is.

Basically, I think she’s one of the best female punk singers ever. She has this brilliant way of shouting whilst remaining perfectly in tune. Her voice is like a thousand yard stare, daring you to call her out as she imbues even the fruitiest Feck/Christian lyrics with a deathly commitment that can… what? Chill the blood, shiver the spine, break the glass. I dunno – insert your own cliché. It’s fucking brilliant anyway. We’ve all got a muso-ish tendency buried in us somewhere to kinda resent people in bands who don’t play an instrument or write songs, but we can tell that tendency to fuck off whenever Rachel sings. His songs plus her voice = a combination that can practically stop my heart beating for two or three minutes. So I just thought I’d mention that before we move on.


I don’t think Comet Gain were anywhere near my favourite band after ‘Tigertown Pictures’, but they certainly seemed crazed and mysterious enough to keep me interested. I know I liked them enough that when I saw their NEXT album in some corporate clearout sale, I picked that up too.

For ages, my copy had a big ugly sticker that said £4.99 on the front. I don’t remember where from. Maybe Virgin? Maybe Leicester? An insalubrious locale for such a weighty acquisition.

The album is called ‘Realistes’. I probably went around for years calling it ‘Realist-ees’, but obviously it’s pronounced ‘Realists’. Long-time readers may recall that I declared it my favourite album released between 2000 and 2009. I’m honestly dreading trying to face up to writing something about it, but I’ve committed myself now so I’ll have to bite the bullet. Watch this space.

Labels: Comet Gain