Milk Music.

(Photo by Matt Koroulis on Flickr)

The best new band I’ve discovered this year is Milk Music, from Olympia, WA.

You’ll notice I said “the best”, rather than “my favourite”. Partly just to aid tidy sentence construction, but partly because my belief that this is true extends beyond the usual veil of subjectivity.

Credit where it’s due dept, I picked up on them toward the start of the year following a superlative write-up on Doug Mosurock’s Still Single blog. Since then – via some questionably obtained mp3s - they’ve soundtracked more morning/evening journeys than anything else on record. They just hit that perfect headspace for preparing for another fucking day at work, I suppose. Like much good rock music, their sound speaks of facing up to the crap and ploughing through it. Then having a smoke as all lies in ruins before you. Not that I either smoke or reduce things to ruins on a daily basis, but y’know what I mean.

The essence of what Milk Music does can be dissembled into its constituent parts without much effort;

Propulsive drive and dead-eyed-stare quality comes straight from The Wipers.

Emotionally engaged, riff-heavy song-writing is pure early Dinosaur / late Huskers.

Monster guitar tone via Zeke/Black Flag.

Nothing new under the sun of course, but currently the particular way in which this group slam this stuff together feels like a revelation. Or a sobering punch in the tummy, at least. Milk Music are pretty young guys too (I think?), and ply their wares with the kind of gut level brutality that young guys traditionally should. That’s pretty crucial, I feel.

Ask the man on the street and he’d probably tell you it sounds like grunge. But as Sid Vicious famously put it in a rare moment of insight, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt”. We all know where the good shit was at before the media came up with that label, and so do Milk Music. Hey guess what, it’s still there. Rock Music, I believe it’s called.

In fact, all you 80s/90s Proper Rock veterans, moaning about how the kids today just aren’t making music as uncompromisingly bad-ass as they did before you got old and the internet turned up and spoiled everything: get a clue and leap the generation gap – you have a new favourite band at last, and they probably hate websites just as much as you do.

Their six song 12” ‘Beyond Life’ is beyond good, and you can get in touch with the Perennial Death label to see whether they’ve still got a hard copy left to ship to where you live.

I enjoyed capitalising the phrase Rock Music earlier in this post, so let’s nail our flag to the mast and say that this is the Best American Rock Record in recent memory. The recording isn’t flashy, but it’s not murky either. It’s just right. The guitar is mixed at *the right level*, and long-term readers will know what that means. One day maybe I’ll speak to the bass player, and ask him how it feels having his tone entirely swallowed by his buddy’s low end. And assuming he doesn’t think I’m attempting a crude euphemism and punch me, we can hopefully at least come to an agreement that he’s always there in the background, doing good work.

Here’s a soundcloud of the 12”s title track;



And whilst you’re waiting for that to arrive in the post, you can enjoy the rougher but even louder session that they did for Brian Turner’s WFMU show, with a couple of tunes off the record and a whole bunch of other ones. ‘Thrashing in the Unknown’ in particular is a burnin’ monster, to utilise the same terminology employed by the band in the interview segment in reference to David Crosby’s ‘Almost Cut My Hair’.

Here it is, all free to stream/dl:

What else to say? I dunno. Milk Music have a shitty name, but they’re one hell of a band. As I get older, I’ve noticed my body is becoming less tolerant of the rigours of regularly attending what you Americans call ‘punk shows’, so you can take it as quite the compliment when I say that being stuck in an unventilated basement with a bunch of random maniacs, Milk Music, a cheap vocal PA and a set of full stacks is about the closest thing to paradise I can imagine right now. Oof.

Labels: I like, Milk Music

The Big Comet Gain Post:
FINAL INSTALLMENT.

Thank christ.

VI.



“David and Jon failed the auditions… their guitars sounded wrong.. they’re singing as morons, because nobody sings as a naive ‘hello’..”
- ‘Mainlining the Mystery’

When I moved to London in 2006, Comet Gain were AWOL.

By saying that, I don’t mean to imply that I was in any way ‘down’ with some kind of scene in which I expected to find them – far from it in fact. Still under the spell of ‘Realistes’, I naturally assumed them to be the hippest motherfuckers on the face of the earth, stepping out in immaculate mod finery, drinking cheap spirits and talking neo-Marxist theory with Ian Svenonious as EPI lightshows flicker across the walls in clubs so fucking cool I’d never even heard about them.

Admittedly, I didn’t even have a very good idea of what any of ‘em looked like beyond the blurred faces on the record sleeves, but try as I might I never clocked any CG sightings or activity through late ’06 through the entirety of ’07 up to the first quarter of ’08.

I knew that Jon Slade had his ‘Born Bad’ club night in Brighton, but I never went to Brighton. I knew some friends of friends who were friendly with the whole Fortuna Pop kinda crowd, and rumours trickled down second (/third/fourth) hand that Feck/Christian was a ‘difficult character’. Dark speculations were exchanged that he was ‘big into drugs’, that he’d fled the country, or given up on music, or god knows what.

The ‘leaving the country’ bit was at least vaguely true I think – I gather he’d moved to France for a while to live with his girlfriend. The drugs bit seems more like the kind of kneejerk auto-rumour that circulates around the shadow of any absent rock music savant guy, I suppose. Maybe, maybe not, I dunno. He just doesn’t seem the type to me. Much like the woman who once told me she didn’t like The Mountain Goats because John Darnielle had done ‘many bad things’, I suspect whoever I gleaned that rumour from had just taken ‘City Fallen Leaves’ centrepiece ‘The Punk Got Fucked’ rather too much at face value.

So for a while there, it seemed like I’d missed the party and Comet Gain were no more. No sightings, no news – even the label that put out ‘City..’ had disappeared.

Then: early 2008. I was hanging around with a new friend and we were both really into The Wave Pictures.

[..and god, whatever happened to THEM, whilst we’re on the subject? That one album they did is genuinely amazing, and the live shows were great, but recently they’ve just gone way off the boil, last record sounded like songs existing to fulfil a contract, crawling round looking for a place to die..].

So, uh, anyway – my friend was trying to convince me I should come to the first of a series of shows they were doing at the room upstairs at the Enterprise by Chalk Farm tube, and I was like, yeah, that sounds cool, who’s supporting, and she was like, oh it’s some band called Comet Gain. And I was like HOLY FUCKING SHIT?!?! Comet Gain?? By this stage, you might as well have told me that Serge Gainsbourg had come back from the grave and would be popping in to do a few numbers with Scott Walker on piano.

Needless to say, I was there. As it transpired, the band on this occasion, playing to maybe about thirty people crammed into living room-sized space above the Enterprise, consisted initially of David Feck and Jon Slade, their imitation guitars plugged into tiny Fender practice amps, practically daring each other to try to remember the chords to whatever potential back catalogue favourites they’d scribbled down. As at every subsequent Comet Gain gig, Kay Ishikawa turned up, played her bass parts perfectly, looked disdainfully at everyone, and left again. She is a great bass player.

Lacking a regular drummer, the bloke from mainstream indie band The Cribs had been dispatched to fill-in. That those guys are big CG fans has been well-documented, but apparently their enthusiasm hadn’t yet filtered down to the drummer, who seemed entirely unfamiliar with the songs, winging it on foolproof instructions of the “this one’s fast, then it goes slow for a bit” variety.

Rachel E. was notable by her absence.

Feck certainly LOOKED like a man who’d spent the past three years in France taking drugs. Far from an impeccable mod avenger, he had a look more akin to a red faced sea captain, just washed into port after a tempestuous ocean crossing – bedraggled winter fleece-thing, three weeks stubble, boat shoes and strange, unheimlich motions. Jon Slade looked like he was reaching the end of a 24 hour drinking binge, wishing he could go home for a shower and change of clothes. Actually though, it seems like he always looks like that. Just the way he rolls, I guess.

Of the songs aired, I remember ‘Realistes’, ‘Why I try to Look So Bad’, and golden oldie ‘Raspberries’ (dating back to the heretofore unmentioned ‘90s line-up of the group), abandoned halfway through after several attempts to remember the tune. I recall there being much leery swearing, lager-swilling, and gratuitous use of the word ‘cunt’.

So in retrospect, perfection, but at the time it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Probably a bit of a fiery initiation into the strange rites of the Comet Gain live experience.

Later that evening, I approached David F. with what was no doubt a load of excruciating fanboy blather. Apropos of nothing, he started telling me that he had spent his time off conducting an in-depth study into the magickal properties of ‘60s garage rock, concluding that ‘Louie Louie’ was the perfect rock n’ roll sigil, a basic three chord vehicle for world-altering unconscious intent.

I have subsequently not ventured to speak to him again, simply because as far as awkward rock star / fan conversations go, that one was pretty unbeatable.

VII.

Press shot circa 2009.

“Young, free and single, like the crack in the 45, that makes the guitar snap all night, and in the morning it starts all over again… we aren’t cartoon characters, the pain is true, beware our bitten mouths and finger nails… we have torn ideals… Comet Gain has torn ideals..”
- ‘Jack Nance Hair’

The next time Comet Gain made an appearance must have been a few months later, cos I remember it was a really hot, late Spring evening. In what I can only assume must have been a favour to the people who run/ran it, they were appearing at a sorta informal ‘folk night’ in a room above the Apple Tree pub in Farringdon. For some reason I arrived foolishly early and forgot to bring a book, with the inevitable result that I was quite trashed by the time the band eventually stepped up to play. Blame excitement or beer as you will, but oh man, this was a magnificent gig – probably still the best time I’ve ever seen them.

If the space above the Enterprise was ‘living room sized’, this place actually WAS (and presumably still is) a living room, complete with mantelpiece, arm chairs, little trestle tables and stuff. Although not widely advertised, word of mouth for this one had obviously gone out to the faithful, and place was rammed, the lady charged with collecting £3 from everyone on the door pretty much giving up as people crammed their way onto the staircase trying to gain access.

Some friends of the band who do a ‘60s style light show had still found space to set up their wallpapering table and projector though, bathing the room in ink-blob melting ersatz UFO club glory. There was a (different?) stand-in drummer this time, but Rachel was back, her central presence cheerleading the others into a transcendently ramshackle performance. For some inexplicable reason, Jon Slade was wearing cricket whites and an umpire’s hat. I recall that I was worried about not being able to force my way out to get more beer, but somebody bought one for me, and I was happy! Not bad going considering I went to the gig alone. This truly was the big COMET GAIN ARE BACK moment, and thankfully I don’t have to carry on about it at any greater length, cos Youtube provides.




Such self-deprecating banter as would stir the hearts of the gods. Never exactly one to hide his current obsessions, I remember this one saw Feck wearing a big 13th Floor Elevators pyramid badge, and closing proceedings after they turned the PA off with a solo stumble through Roky’s ‘Splash # 1’. Much as we may fall back on properly promoted gigs at more reliable/comfortable venues, isn’t it a magnificent thing when an ill-advised happenstance like this really comes together? A great night.

Subsequently, I went to see Comet Gain a whole bunch of times as they re-constituted themselves into a viable pop group, gradually accruing members as official drummer Woody Taylor returned, Anne-Laure Guillain joined on keyboard, and now they’ve even recruited a wholly gratuitous third guitarist, making the band circa 2011 a seven piece on occasions when everyone turns up.

Before that though, I remember attending, uh, let’s see now… at least a couple of shows at the Buffalo Bar, probably a few more here and there, and a hilarious turn at the Old Blue Last where they didn’t seem to have a working guitar lead between them, prompting stunned expressions from super-slick support act The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Safe to say CG’s reputation for unreliability and general shamblism reached its apex in (I think?) the summer of ’08, when they were awarded a much-coveted (in some circles) slot headlining the Indietracks festival. By far their biggest engagement since getting back together, and at the very least a well paid summer festival booking announced months in advance. In a nigh-on supernatural feat of disorganisation though, it seems that most of the band *failed to even show up*, citing the fact that nobody told them they were playing, or they’d forgotten, or were busy, or something. I don’t know how many readers are familiar with the organisational faff of being in a band, but if so, CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE the heights of miscommunication that would lead to such a situation? It’s positively heroic.

Reports as to what actually transpired vary, but the consensus of opinion seems to suggest that Jon Slade took the stage with a bunch of girls he’d rounded up and tried to instigate some sort of ill-fated requests set / mass singalong / general noise-making session. Predictably, reactions to this astounding debacle vary widely: one friend I spoke to described being wholly enthused by the “ten minutes of chaos” that followed a days worth of mediocre twee-pop, but long-standing fans of the band from outside of the London/Brighton axis were understandably less than thrilled at seeing their first and perhaps only chance to see such a revered group contemptuously pissed away. Brilliant lark though it may seem to those of us lucky enough to be able to see them play regularly, I’d imagine the whole episode must have created a lot of ill-will toward the band (not least on the part of the influential festival organisers, I’m sure).

Similarly, one of my favourite Comet Gain shows was another indie-pop hoedown headlining appearance, at London Popfest in early 2009(?), a fantastic mixture of beauty and chaos that seemed to go on for hours. Things started conventionally ‘well’, with a magnificent cover of Felt’s ‘Ballad of the Band’, as captured here;



..but soon Feck was riffing on Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’, suggesting that “strangling people with neckties in Soho” seemed a better career move than “doing this”, as the whole thing collapsed into some drunken mess of noise and semi-coherent beat poetry. Goddamn I love this band, I remember thinking, as disgusted tweesters pushed past me toward the exit, leaving the place half empty by the time they finally ground to a halt.

Indeed, the disjuncture between the perfectionism and fiery idealism of Comet Gain’s records and the self-sabotaging car crash of their live incarnation has proven a stumbling block for many potential fans. After years of worshipful listening to the LPs, I too was pretty taken aback by it initially, only gradually coming to appreciate, nay love, the chaotic grace of the band’s unpredictable stage presence. As well as appealing to me as a lifelong proponent of musical mess and amateurism, I can’t help but find a strange triumph in the way they hide noble sentiments and sky-scraping talent behind a veil of bloody-minded alcoholic piss-taking – a classic diversion tactic that draws comparison with a whole lineage of British outsider culture, from Wyndham Lewis and Dylan Thomas through to the Television Personalities, Swell Maps and (them again) the Mekons.

The brilliant thing is of course, they never do it on purpose. I mean, that would just be stupid. They try their best to be a brilliant live group playing brilliant songs, and frequently succeed… but sometimes things go wrong, the atmosphere gets weird, and instead of getting all precious about it, they just have a laugh and go with it, ending up wherever the feeling takes them. It’s an inspiring thing to see.

I guess they’ve probably gotten a bit more (ugh) professional though as they’ve picked up steam and acquired new members, leading up gradually to the release of their new album earlier this year. Performances rarely degenerate into total disorder anymore, and by all accounts the handful of shows they did in America the other year left everyone pretty impressed. But still, pop along to a Comet Gain recital and you can still fully expect to expect random members failing to turn up or ducking off stage never to return (hey, it doesn’t matter so much when there are seven of ‘em), unexpected cover versions standing in for songs they can’t remember, and sight of David Feck on his knees, trying to tune a guitar string whilst twisting the wrong tuning peg. For about three minutes. Beautiful stuff.

We’re finally reaching the end of this bloody thing now, reaching the present at last. What more do you need to know? Well… they’ve done a bunch of one-off singles for different labels, all of which are strange and great in equal measure. The singles/odds n’ sods collection ‘Broken Record Prayers’ came out in in ’09 and is bloody fantastic, and now in 2011 we’ve finally had the new LP, ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ (and who else on god’s earth could get away with calling their record that). Needless to say, it’s a monster, the rockers rocking in jagged furious fashion, the epic opening cut pissing in the face of anyone who purports to care whether Bob Dylan is still alive, and even the now-inevitable sloppy acoustic songs taking on a rich, Go-Betweensy grandeur after a few listens. In between, Feck found time to record an LP as Cinema Red & Blue with members of Crystal Stilts, Hamish Kilgour from The Clean and others, and it’s perhaps even better. You should get it, if you haven’t already. Attendees at Comet Gain’s recent two-night residency at London’s Lexington were gifted with a copy of ‘Thee Optical Sewer’, what promises (I’ll believe it when I see ‘em) to be the first of potentially many band-produced fanzines, and, jinx though it may be to say it, it looks as if they’re going from strength to strength, adapting well to a new standing as a kind of cult indie institution with little left to prove.

As an infuriating happy ending (cos nobody wants a happy ending from a rock biography), here they are playing to what I’m sure must have been by far their biggest audience to date, at the Primavera festival in Barcelona earlier this year.

VIII.

TEDIOUS ROCK-CRIT AFTERWORD.

Sitting on a long train journey recently, meditating (as you do) on my choices for The Best Rock n’ Roll Groups of All Time, I came to the conclusion that there are essentially two models for a truly brilliant band. First, there’s what you might call the Unified Band: the band who look the same, are on exactly the same page, fighting a kind of war in the name of a singular musical vision. If you look behind the scenes, there will almost certainly be some deeply eccentric and conflicting personalities behind this band, but when they’re clocked in they are a unified force, creating music of such basic, uncompromising power that it changes the shape of the world forever: The Ramones, Stooges, Black Sabbath, Les Rallizes Denudes, The Shop Assistants, Dead Moon, Black Flag, The Misfits, The Sonics, Bikini Kill – take your pick.

Comet Gain are not one of those bands. But at the other end of the playground, where things get weird and messy, you’ve got an entirely different kind of band, a kind of band that reaches further, aims higher, hits some point of singularity and falls back into a beautiful mess. A band which, though it may have a central guiding presence, is essentially composed of a bunch of random misfits, and has little fixed idea of exactly what it’s doing or where it’s going, making it liable to fly off in any number of directions, throwing together themes and references and big mixed up emotional signifiers as it sees fit, celebrating it’s own contradictions and blurring the boundaries between genius and nonsense, transforming the internal world it shares with it’s listeners just a thoroughly as the Unified Band might shake the walls of the wider world. I’m sure you can find your own examples of this kind of band, but I won’t throw out any obvious names right now, because as far as I’m concerned at the time of writing, Comet Gain are the best one.

Labels: Comet Gain

A Very Short Review of Indietracks 2011.

Well if it turns out there’s another weekend during the remainder of 2011 that is even half as full of love and camaraderie, sunshine and shenanigans and, well… beer, as the one just past, I’ll eat my hat.

A more friendly and positive place to spend time would be hard to imagine; even through the hungover journey home yesterday, I was grinning and giggling like a happy fool. Basically I wish I could just scoop up all the people I spent time with during the weekend and go on a big adventure with them. Or just live on a campsite as a strange cult of high functioning alcoholics, whatever’s easiest.

But enough about my private life. Musically there’s not really much more that needs to be said: I went to see all the groups on the bill who I think are great, and they were all great. No big new discoveries or bitter disappointments, but that’s fine. About half the bands I was there to see are friends too, so any pretence of objectivity would get a bit silly. I’ve written about most of ‘em before I’m sure, so you can have a look at my scanned schedule above and do the math. Sock Puppets, Wendy Darlings, Fireworks, Horowitz, Mat from the Specific Heats: youse guys are the best.

Oh, and Zipper and Dignan Porch were really good too, although I don’t know ‘em personally so probably shouldn’t refer to them as “youse guys” or anything.

Of the bigger headlining-type acts on the bill, I’m pleased to report that Jeff Lewis played a blinder, and sad yet unsurprised to note that Herman Dune didn’t - but we can talk about their dispiriting descent into mediocrity another day. I really enjoyed Edwyn Collins’ set despite my unfamiliarity with his back catalogue – from songwriting through sound through backing band selection, he struck me as a guy who knows where it’s at, so overdue investigations will be made. Yes, he played the hit, and yes, it was great.

I felt kinda bad for spending the whole weekend having to tell Crystal Stilts fans how much I dislike Crystal Stilts, but felt at least slightly vindicated when some friends left their set halfway through, citing similar problems to the ones I’ve always experienced with them. I seem to be doomed to miss Milky Wimpshake whenever they play (an extremely minor curse placed on my head by a slightly miffed indie sorcerer perhaps?), so sorry to say it happened again. It would have been nice to see Frances McKee from The Vaselines too, but sadly I didn’t get a spot in the still-very-small church in time.

So that’s that really. Huge thanks to all the people who help make Indietracks happen – still the best example of what a music festival can/should be that I’ve ever been to. To be honest, given the company, the atmosphere, the location, it would have been the best weekend of the year even if they’d just booked local polka bands, so all the great music was a nice bonus. I hope I didn’t do too much minor social blundering when my mouth occasionally overtook my brain, and I’m sorry if I accidentally overlooked anyone amid the huge number of nice people I wanted to chat to, but basically: look forward to seeing everybody same time, same place next year.

Labels: festivals, Indietracks