The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 3.

IV.

“If you worship an idea long enough it becomes real / a rainbow burst in suburban gloom / the Weekend Gods will dream a better you”

- sleevenotes, ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’

‘Realistes’ is a difficult record to write about. It speaks for itself too well. If you’ve not heard it, I recommend getting hold of a copy before reading this. Seriously – I mean c’mon, it’s not bloody hard, and if you’re with me thus far on this thing, it’s not going to be an acquisition you’ll regret. Shockingly, I think it’s actually out of print, and Amazon.co.uk says a new copy will set you back £18.50. But thankfully, this is 2011, so there are other ways. You can probably get a legal download for a more reasonable sum from your preferred vendor and still hoof some cash back toward the band and the label. Or you could magic it up on yr Spotify or whatever, or… well, y’know, there are ways. Just get it. And put it on. You’ll see what I mean.

I guess you’ll miss out on the artwork, and the credits and such, but such is life. Again, they’re made with vinyl in mind, which made poring over the little words and pictures on the CD trying to pull out the detail a bit of a challenge. I remember being surprised that Comet Gain – who struck me as a bit of an out-of-nowhere loner kinda outfit on ‘Tigertown..’ – had managed to pull in some super-cool friends on this one. Some familiar faces returned on the blurry black & white shots and type-written cut-ups on the back cover – there’s Kay again, still on bass, Rachel’s still doing ‘vox’, both looking very demure in their blurred snapshots. But now none other than Jon Slade – THE Jon Slade, from Huggy Bear! – is in the band too, on ‘gtr/keys’. ‘d.christian’ still hogs the song-writing credits, but otherwise he seems to have been replaced with some character called David Feck, pictured here as a dishevelled gent resplendent in pointy shoes, trenchcoat and shades, clutching an ancient stripy suitcase (full of mixtapes?), looking as if the photographer had caught him making a 5am getaway from his flat before the bailiffs turned up.


Drums on this album are provided, believe it or not, by Chris Appelgren, boss of Lookout! Records and singer in The Peechees and The Pattern. What band but Comet Gain could get a hipster-millionaire record label mogul from San Francisco to come to Croydon to play drums on their record, then not really bother to even tell anyone? (Chris wrote an informative bit about the process of making the album, which you can still read on the Kill Rock Stars website here.) Then to top it all off, one song has a guest vocal from KATHLEEN HANNA. Whoa, how’d they pull that one off? Believe me, these are all the kind of names that would have me handing over my cash before hearing note back in 2002-ish. Whatever else they might be, these Comet Gains were clearly some hip motherfuckers.

Thankfully though, I wasn’t cruising on the fumes of secondhand indie cred for long after I hit play. If ‘Tigertown Pictures’ played out like some tangled mess of noise and sentiment and anger, ‘Realistes’ sounds like the same elements, streamlined and fully-realised - music as a manifesto, the sound of a band who know exactly what they’re about, where they’re heading and how they’re going to get there, determined to drag you along with them and to push you into being the best person you can possibly be in the process, just so that you can dare stand alongside the example this record sets.

If you’ve followed my advice above and are listening to it, you’ll already know what an incredible opener ‘The Kids At The Club’ is – a perfect example of CG’s endearing habit of occasionally wrongfooting those who’d write them off an a bunch of esoteric fuck-ups by casually tossing off the most perfectly obvious, massively anthemic, universally applicable, 100% proof POP HIT you heard in your life. They’ve got a whole brace of songs like this from various points in their career – tunes so stupidly gigantic that it’s almost embarrassing for them to play them live, or for somebody else to DJ them or do a cover version – it’d be like trying to curry favour by ‘doing the hit’, even it’s a ‘hit’ that only a couple of thousand people have ever heard.

It would be all too easy to read ‘Kids at the Club’ as some myopic hymn to London-centric indie nightlife, but this is an interpretation that should be strenuously avoided. It is a song about passing on the flame of the transformative power of pop music, from the memories of your own youth to the realities of the next generation, and the one after that – the one that’s happening right outside your window, right now, and continuing forever more. When I listen to it today, I’m far from a kid, I’m very rarely ‘at the club’ and when I am it’s usually a let-down, but that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a song about having faith in the fact that The Kids (the same ones who are alright) are out there somewhere, maybe at a ‘club’ I’ve never heard of and wouldn’t understand in the slightest, but they’re there, that’s the main thing, and that’s what lets us breath a sigh of relief and believe.


It is from this almost religious faith in pop music and it’s associated culture that ‘Realistes’ gets it’s power – it’s a strong record, but its self-assurance comes solely from that moment of transcendence when the perfect song peaks at the perfect moment, and from a violent opposition to the banality that reasserts itself when the beat fades away again. I’ve always thought that any successful rock n’ roll band needs to be kicking against something; maybe the reason I like Comet Gain so much is that at their best moments they’re kicking against EVERYTHING – their music is that of pure idealism. “Defiance” is a word I’ve always found impossible to avoid when writing about them – it’s a kind of short-hand for the essential component behind all of their words and music, and sure enough, here they are in the middle of their ‘manifesto record’, conveniently summarising their position for all time on track #4, “My Defiance”:

“The look on
A young girl’s face
When she turns on
Her first record player

I need that
I want that
I’ll grab that
Sensation by the throat

It brings back the feeling of the love in your eyes
Dancing in your bedroom in North-West Five
So get up, and use me
Don’t sell me, here comes the chorus now”

In 2002 or 2011, there is nothing I can possibly say to that. Speaking as someone who’s writing this crap, to someone who’s reading it: shall we take a few seconds to stand and salute?

V.

There is so much more I could say about ‘Realistes’. I could do you a full track-by-track, but we’d be here all night. Let’s stay general. Let’s talk a bit about the SOUND of this album, which, obviously, I love.

A lot of people will tell you that Comet Gain are an ‘indie-pop’ band. Some will see this strange appellation as the sole reason to pay attention to them, others as a warning to avoid them at all costs. When I bought ‘Realistes’ I had no fucking idea what ‘indie-pop’ was. If Comet Gain ticks the boxes then maybe I still don’t. The music on ‘Realistes’ has never sounded like some fey, self-deprecating thing to me; on the contrary, it’s about as far from those clichés as it’s possible to get. This is soul, this is punk, this is noise – this is every kind of music that’s strong and direct and uncompromising, but filtered through the fingers of men and women with far too many 7” singles, far too many pin badges and Oxfam paperbacks and guilty middle-class backgrounds… so where does that leave us exactly?

Looking at it another way, it could well be argued that any band who take the time to cover ‘She Never Understood’ by Alan McGee’s band Biff!Bang!Pow! should be laughed out of court the second they try to claim allegiance to anything but darkest, dismallest INDIE. But, oh – nobody ever thought of making it sound quite like this. The jangle on the guitars is there, the fainting fit chord progressions are still there, but no way man, this is not some fussily recorded peon to The Byrds and rose-tinted loneliness rendered by soft-spoken fellas in corduroy jackets. This is the sound of a one-take roar in a basement, guitarists pushing the treble ‘til it hurts, fighting a spluttering PA system as the motorik rhythm pulses like a heartbeat, pure beautiful tangle within a hairs-breadth of collapse. SHE NEVER UNDERSTOOD. Christ, just that title. The sheer exultant self-pity of it – imagine it yelled over this soaring, bleeding racket by these stiff-legged drop-outs. Is that ‘indie-pop’? I don’t fucking know.

Like most great albums, ‘Realistes’ is recorded cheaply, quickly, with no time for bullshit. Everything bleeds into everything else, ‘White Light/White Heat’ style. The guitars clang and howl and bawl, weird overcompressed keyboards chime in like Casio angel choirs, and Appelgren’s utilitarian pulse never lets up, even on the slow numbers. It’s clear and loud and brilliant-sounding, but also kinda inexplicably tinny, like the whole thing was mixed on cassette tape or something. It’s recorded like they were in a HURRY – to fight for the workers, to free the kids from a life of drudgery, to light a fire or flee the country or get to the pub – but somehow the stars were aligned, and everything just went *right*.

I’ve been listening to ‘Realistes’ regularly for just about ten years now, and I’m not sick of it yet.


In retrospect, I can see that the album’s pure aesthetic vision is a bit of a put-on, or rather a wish – a sort of dress-up of what Feck and his gang desperately wanted their lives to be, and a prayer to make it happen, summoning visions of steely faces from Godard and Truffaut movies, and of daring young intellectuals hustling in cinemas and record shops (“three Polanskis tonight / you bring the speed and I’ll bring the popcorn”); of first generation mods whooping it up on Tower Bridge Road, and of Otis Redding down on his knees at the Apollo; of the legends of Billy Liar and Frankie Machine and Mick Travis; of rioters in Brixton and the Rough Trade bands scratching out their strange new language; of George Orwell in Spain, loading his rifle in the name of human dignity.

In the world created by ‘Realistes’, pop culture and politics aren’t just some awkward alliance: they’re one and the same: reflecting your beliefs in the clothes you wear, the songs you listen to, the book you read isn’t just a surface gesture: it’s the first step toward remaking the world in your own image – the image handed down to us from the twentieth century’s endless army of noble, doomed rebels. Rebelling against what? Anything, everything; what have you got? When everything in the modern world seems like an obstacle, that’s when you’ve got the power to head down to the basement and make a great fucking record.

Blimey, I’m getting all worked up here. Just like I was on January 19th 2006, when I wrote a bit about the penultimate song on ‘Realistes’, “Don’t Fall in Love if you Want to Die in Peace”, which I recall listening to about ten times a day at the time;

“The very definition of an underrated band, Comet Gain have pretty much provided the almost embarrassingly accurate soundtrack to my personal universe and belief system over the past year or so. They’ve got a new album out at the moment which I haven’t picked up yet, so for now I’ll stick to this song from their previous one, ‘Realistes’, which blew my mind and stomped my heart anew on my walk into work this morning. It’s a fairly atypical Comet Gain track, but still encompasses all the reasons I love this band. A clumsily picked out guitar melody, a girl singing with a guy on backing vox, some kinda really dodgy sounding synthesised strings, a song of bold, well-trodden sentiments that in the hands of other musicians would have us cringing...... how oh my lord do these simple things combine into such spell-binding genius?

Comet Gain sing and play here with a mix of guts and beauty and grit and dirt and despair and hope that reminds me of my cherished bootleg of Nico and Lou Reed demoing ‘Chelsea Girls’ in a hotel room, the voices nervous and untrained and just on the verge of shouting, the music tender and brittle and staying just the right side of collapse. […] when Rachel sings “.. look at your sky through Bob Dylan’s eyes..”, my soul just about spills out on the pavement and runs off to find a drink.

So let’s forget the simpering idiots who’ve made “indie” an insult – Comet Gain know what their perfect world sounds like, what’s important to them is what’s important to you and me, and they’re chasing it for all it’s worth. Unlike so many, they fucking mean what they say, and the result is some of the best and most underappreciated music you’ll hear this decade.”

I was being a right sad-sack when I wrote that. If I’d only let the CD play on a few more times, rather than skipping back to that one all the time, maybe I’d have sorted my shit out a lot sooner. Digital alarm clock chimes begin the album’s title track, excising the heartbreak with a roar of sloganeering reassurance, a reiteration of all the hope and energy that’s been poured into the preceding ten tracks, as the band almost literally kneel in worship before the healing power of rock n’ roll, disappearing over the horizon on a Hawkwind drum beat and a guitar sound like someone trying to record a jet engine on a Tascam 4-track – “this is my prayer, this is my prayer, this is my…”

Labels: Comet Gain