Since it began creeping in on 2005’s ‘City Fallen Leaves’, the “wistful look back at sepia-tinted past” approach has become one of the dominant modes of Comet Gain’s song-writing.

On that album, this nostalgia (of the personal rather than cultural variety, you’ll note) came spiked with blind anger, loneliness and despair – a kind of late 30s rage against the dying of an unfulfilled youth, pushed toward a bleak and equally distraught middle age.

By the time we reach ‘Paperback Ghosts’ a decade later though, things have obviously changed a lot. The band has settled into a far more gentle and contented brand of contemplation, repeatedly reflecting on the need to pull beauty out of life in the here and now without forgetting the past, and so on and so forth. And like the doting relative sinking into a big armchair in a posh pub after dinner, they are disinclined to leave this particular spot without good reason.

Whereas ‘City Fallen Leaves’ saw David Feck channelling a battered and bruised night-bus refugee from some hellish weekend of spiteful London disaster, feedback of some shit club ringing in his ears as he staggered off into the night, now his songs feel more like the musings of a comfortably settled former hipster [hopefully I don't need to tell you that I mean the older, more positive useage of the word], relaxing in his flat on a leafy street of a Sunday afternoon, as his wife potters about in the garden. Pulling dusty paperbacks off reassuringly wooden shelves, re-reading the sleevenotes on the back of old LPs, endlessly cogitating on memories of the triumphs and nightmares that have brought him here - the character at the heart of these songs has made good, insofar as such characters ever can. But where the hell does that leave his rock band, that’s the question.

Well rest assured, the opening track here, ‘Long After Tonight’s Candles are Blown’, is magnificent – a song that works so well, capturing the overall mood and message of this album so beautifully, it makes much of what follows it feel pretty surplus to requirements. This is stately, grown up indie guitar music of a quite glorious vintage, each lyric drawn out just right as it falls against the gossamer backing of overlaid guitar-tangle, lonesome violin and brushed drum shuffle, hitting a level of affirmative poignancy that matches the band’s very best moments from the past, as it mixes up the universal and the personal carefully enough to really hit us hard; “..from Beverley Road to Junction Road / and on the stage tonight / the guitars break / we make mistakes / freeze-framed in our own dawn light / we are holding on to life / because heaven, is a lie”. It’s like a happy ending to all the strife that’s come before. A real knock-out.

After that, it’s hard to know where the record can go really. ‘Sad Love And Other Stories’ and ‘Behind The House She Lived In’ jangle away in pleasant enough fashion (those who liked ‘An Arcade..’ and ‘She Had Daydreams’ from the previous album will enjoy them), and ‘Wait til December’ provides some sketchy, heart of sleeve meandering that seems of-a-piece with the slow, less successful songs on ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’. But with the first song having set out the album’s stall so powerfully, it’s hard to escape an “our work here is done” sort of feeling, as side one absent-mindedly wanders on.

Indeed, the album is so settled into its reflective, low key kinda mood by this point that the group’s sporadic attempts to rouse it into action begin to feel a bit forced (like that aforementioned relative painfully extracting him/herself from the upholstery when the dogs are barking or the children are making a mess). As such, the LP’s more lively excursions begin to just feel like character studies - curious tangents lifted from random page openings of those prized Oxfam finds, too distant to really foster much emotional engagement.

For ‘Breaking Open The Head (part. 1)’, I assume our hero is flicking through some decadent chronicle of ‘60s counter-culture psychonautic daring-do, as this direct cousin of the previous LP’s Velvetised psyche-punk beatnik biog ‘Herbert Huncke’ swiftly stomps through references to Philip K. Dick and Brion Gysin, dream machines and invisible universes. It’s perfectly good, but more “gosh, that’s quite interesting” than something that’s really going to put a crack in your noggin (or even lead you to reassess your plans for the afternoon).

The chipper indie-pop of ‘Avenue Girls’ fares better, with David turning back to some of his beloved British New Wave – a Penguin edition of ‘A Kind of Loving’ or ‘Georgy Girl’ perhaps - full of lost girls with blonde bangs in their mothers’ borrowed overcoats, staring out to sea after an altercation at the fairground - all that kinda shit. We’ve been here before, far too many times, but the sweet whirl of the song pulls us in, at least for a minute or two, reminding us that, actually, this kind of music is quite nice sometimes, isn’t it? When it's done well, I mean.

Somewhere within that organ swirl and jangle, I can feel that particular cultural anchor, forever pulling me back (because yeah, I’ve got all these books on the shelf too, even if I’ve not read them for a while). In the same category, the chorus to ‘The Last Love Letter’ invites us to embrace “the first words, that I thought of”, in the spirit of which I'll just say: lovely. No other word needed. Shut off your twee-deflectors for a while, and enjoy a really good song, nicely done.

The spirit of random shelf browsing spills over into the more mellow numbers too, as Feck’s apparent increasing interest in esoteric subject matter and disinclination to give a fuck now that his cult songwriter cred is firmly re-established sees all kinds of weird allusions popping up in the midst of what would previously have been the strict social realism of his more introspective moments. Pirate ships, minotaurs, John Dee, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and a rather torturous metaphor built around Blake’s ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, all get a look in, whilst the scarlet shadow of Marjorie Cameron herself is apparently evoked at one point (or so says the press release). The elliptical ‘Sixteen Oh Four’ meanwhile concerns itself entirely with Rosicrucianism, insofar as I can tell. Let’s hope that all this succeeds in putting the wind up at least one or two blinkered indie-pop purists, but to be honest it often stands out as pretty bulbous and peculiar within the neat n’ shiny, string-enhanced shimmer of these songs’ somewhat overwrought, wedding cakey production.

Even the dogged punk grind of closing track ‘Confessions of a Daydream’ – a noble attempt to send us off on a defiant eterna-groove, ala the title track of ‘Realistes’ - doesn’t quite spit and snarl the way it should, as a few bracing minutes of impassioned stream of consciousness wordplay trail off into a murky cod-psychedelic disaster (including a spoken word guest slot from that bloke out of The Yummy Fur) that would have been hilarious if they’d blundered into it on stage, but feels a bit ‘off’ when closing an otherwise obsessively scrubbed up & mannered long-player.

Well, at least I suppose it leaves us staggering off into the dark again, reassuringly unsure of ourselves, even if you get the feeling that this time ‘round, David’s just taking out the bins before returning to his armchair, rather than marching off headfirst into a troubled and tormented night. And good for him, and good on the rest of the band too – like the past 20 years’ worth of Teenage Fanclub records, there is a happy feeling at the heart of ‘Paperback Ghosts’ that’s hard to begrudge its creators.

Taking my “long-standing Comet Gain fan” hat off for a moment, ‘Paperback Ghosts’ is a not record that I can objectively defend or recommend to any great extent. In terms of sound and song-writing it is almost certainly the band’s weakest LP to date (which admittedly makes it the weakest in a very strong field), and, one or two stand-out tracks aside, I’d probably advise those who aren’t diehard CG fans to approach with caution. If you’re not on the bus already, this isn’t the best place to buy a ticket.

For those of us in for the long haul though, to feel disappointed at the relative failings of an album as assuredly warm-hearted as ‘Paperback Ghosts’ seems churlish by this stage - like receiving a holiday postcard from an old friend and complaining about the hand-writing.

Labels: album reviews, Comet Gain