With the departure of heart n’ soul members Jon Slade and Kay Ishikawa, the dissolution of long-time record label Fortuna Pop and a more general fading away / changing-of-the-guard within the London indie scene which had nurtured them for so long, 2014’s wistful and subdued ‘Paperback Ghosts’ felt like a natural farewell for the bedraggled old beast of a band that is Comet Gain; a dignified wave goodbye as they stride off into a golden, autumnal sunset.

But, it was never quite going to happen that way, was it? Like a long forgotten mate knocking on your door one rainy midnight with a six pack and something on his mind – like that teenage fave LP you gave away to charity, then re-bought years later for £20 because you’re an idiot – Comet Gain are back in action, sounding wilder and more impassioned than they have since, well… since kids now taking their GCSEs were busy being born, let’s put it that way.

The band’s members have, it is safe to assume, been significantly exercised by outrage arising from the circumstances surrounding the U.K.’s decision to withdraw from the European Union (I refuse to humour this kick to the head of civilisation with a six letter contraction that makes it sound like a fucking breakfast cereal) – and who in heaven’s name can blame them?

Being hearty, good-natured folk, Comet Gain are not exactly leaving us in any doubt as to where they stand on the current sorry state of affairs, as opening track ‘We’re All Fucking Morons’ makes abundantly clear. Herein, vocalist Rachel Evans pleads with her hypothetical opponents; “I just want to understand you / before I go to war with you”. The hectoring, enervated punk rock stomp which follows suggests that, like so many of us, she did not receive a satisfactory response to her entreaty.

Second track, ‘The Girl with the Melted Mind and the Fear of the Open Door’ is classic Comet Gain, a surging rush of knotty guitar n’ organ textures, breaking against the wall of Woodie Taylor’s ever-steady drumming, its flowery lyrical conjurations seemingly addressing mental illness, social anxiety, drug freakout or some combination thereof. It could fit in nicely next to career highlights like ‘Why I Try To Look So Bad’ or ‘The Ballad of Frankie Machine’. Man, this new burst of anger is really paying off.

Next up though is the real reason you need to listen to this record, and why the idea of a revised Comet Gain line-up fighting their way through the tail end of 2019 suddenly seems like a good idea. Over five and a half seething minutes, the unpromisingly titled ‘Bad Nite at the Mustache’ finds David Feck/Christian’s poetical alter-ego Charlie Damage unburdening his splenetic soul, and it’s a beautiful, terrible, horribly necessary thing to behold.

It takes some guts in the present historical moment for a middle-aged rock band to evoke “another burning tower block / filled with screaming ghosts” without sounding crass, but this track has the hackle-raising, desperate power to pull it off, a freezing rain-soaked dash across some poverty-blighted street almost visible as David/Charlie sneers that, “life is always cheap, always led by the creeps,” the rebel lifer heart beneath his suburban dad exterior rising to the surface as he curses “the tired, dumb fuckers”, a shriek of needle-peaking feedback rise behind him before that shaky, over-driven jangle of yore rises like a practice room phoenix for the chorus, calling upon the abused nation – or the whole abused world, perhaps? – to “cauterise the wounds / with something like fire”.

It’s stunning, frankly – not just a full force reminder of why bands with the kind of wounded, ineffable spirit that powers Comet Gain remain worth persisting with through years of botched gigs and patchy albums, just to catch that moment when the stars align, but also as one of the most devastatingly direct artistic responses to the sickening social malaise we are all guilty of contributing to I’ve heard in this blighted year.

(I realise this probably wasn’t the prescription he had in mind, but in view of the date I’m posting this, I’ll simply note that when you colour in a picture of some fire, you do so with red and yellow combined. JUST SAYIN’.)

Whilst Charlie Damage may insist that “the past wants to make a memory out of the future” though, Senor Feck is certainly not above submerging himself in that past for a bit of comforting wallow, once again reaching way beyond his own lived memories for ‘The Society of Inner Nothing’, a solid jangler which appears to salute the “lavender boys and fireworks girls”, “searching for Horus and Pan” under the auspices of the none-more-rose-tinted ‘60s counter-culture, as well as perpetuating his curious lyrical fixation with Rosicrusianism (perhaps a PKD reference in this instance? – not sure).

Slightly closer to home, ‘The Godfrey Brothers’ is another album highlight, a wonderful, expansive track, very much in the spirit of the ‘Paperback Ghosts’ material. The album’s press release straight-forwardly states that this number is “about the Godfrey brothers”, but this proves a sneaky bit of phrasing, given that the only thing which pops up when you plonk that into your nearest non-Google search engine is the blokes behind late ‘90s chill-out titans Morcheeba.

Even after two whole decades ploughing this particular furrow, it took me a good few minutes of brain-think to recognise that the song is actually a tribute to tragically short-lived siblings Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks, founders of Swell Maps, wgo are both given first person voice here, the latter finding succour in his West Hampstead flat with “500 Beach Boys bootlegs”, the former surrounding himself with “scented scarves and imaginary girls”. Key line: “they all thought we were strange / working upstairs at the Music and Tape Exchange”.

There is a real streak of pain running through this song however, undercutting the band’s usual nostalgic drift; the creeping realisation perhaps that the dark shadow of mortality has already started to fall, not only across the immortal scraggle-haired genii to whom the song is dedicated, but the whole warped generation who were making counter-cultural hay when David and co were young and dumb.

Initially, I wished the same verisimilitude could be located within side #2’s ‘Mid 8-Ts’, a pre-fab indie disco romp through the C-86 glory days of “jumper with holes / playing our roles”. Reminiscent of the ‘City Fallen Leaves’ era, it has the potential to feel like pretty weak tea for those of who don’t share these memories first hand, but the admission that “your heart plays tricks on you / forgets about the shit on your Beatle boots” puts a rather different spin on things, and, in view of this album’s angrier, more uncertain meditations on time, nationality and belonging, there’s a pretty ominous undertow to the chorus’s repeated declaration that “you belong here”, and that “you might as well go where you belong”. That, presumably, being the past, or some aging scenester simulacrum thereof, at the very least.

A word is necessary meanwhile about this album’s production, which, surprisingly, must be the messiest, most quote-unquote “lo-fi” set of recordings the band have released since the heady days of ‘Realistes’ and ‘Tigertown Pictures’, in spite of the presence of consummate pros Ben Phillipson (Eighteenth Day of May) and James Hornsey (The Clientele) in the current line-up.

Were I to take the role of a whinging contrarian, I could make the argument that the urgency of those earlier albums resulted from the fact they were recorded in a time and place - pre-pro-tools, pre-internet – in which the band simply lacked access to a proper studio and someone with the necessary brains to push the buttons in it, and that their hair-raising magic resulted to some extent from the group’s struggle to transcend their limited means, their inspired material and enervated performances punching through the murky mix as if it were a wet paper bag.

Such a ‘feel’ is difficult to recreate however, twenty years down the line, in a room where all the drum mics have clearly been set up properly and the clean-toned guitars are allowed to jangle just so when required to do so on the quieter songs. After all, when it comes to stuff like this, you can never go back, and, here in 2019, the decision to include bulbous, clipping bass frequencies on ‘Victor Jara Finally Found’ and muffed/submerged vocal takes elsewhere simply seems weird and lazy, rather than feeling like unavoidable collateral damage incurred in the midst of a wild, spur-of-the-moment taping session.

Returning the mic to the part of me which is not a whinging contrarian however (hi, fans), I can’t help but observe that the rawer, looser, noisier performances captured on ‘Fireraisers Forever!’ – presumably laid down with a bare minimum of either rehearsal or over-dubs, prioritising ‘feel’ over tuning or fidelity - are a real breath of fresh air after the finicky professionalism and try-hard, garage-rock pastiche of recent years; an honest and raucous reflection of band’s essential essence which propels the anger and desperation of the album’s best material safely over the finish line.

Reverting to more tired Pitchfork-isms meanwhile, I’m also duty-bound to report that ‘Fireraisers Forever!’ is shamelessly front-loaded… but perhaps in the end that’s not such a bad thing? Whereas the album comes out swinging with the single best side of music the band have recorded since David’s return from exile in the late ‘00s, the material on the flip fails to maintain this intensity, soon veering off in some weird, meandering directions which are at best, uh, interesting..? (the organ-dominated rebel fashion exegesis of ‘Werewolf Jacket’), and at worst pretty hard work (the on-the-nose “true confessions of a fuck up” litany of ‘Life On Your Knees’).

Pointedly titled closer ‘I Can’t Live Here Anymore’ likewise doesn’t quite “come off” in terms of conventional song-writing, but you know what? It really doesn’t need to. Seemingly a far more personal take on the damage inflicted on our narrator’s family life by the world’s recent turn to shit, there is no way I could look this band in the eye as David sings “and if there’s no tomorrow / I’ll be right here, holding on to you”, and tell them that this song is anything other than exactly what it needs to be, especially once a small child – David’s kid, perhaps? – enters the mix, nervously singing along on the last few choruses. Not a dry eye in the house, I’m telling you, and no dry tinder either post-Dec 12th, more than likely.

Comet Gain have made a few damn-near-perfect records in their time, and this certainly isn’t one of them – but again, do we really need it to be? Certainly no more so than we ever needed The Mekons or Swell Maps or Alex Chilton to release LPs which played front-to-back satisfactorily without getting lost or making a mess.

Now more than ever, it’s the continuation of the spirt which counts, more than watching the clock, monitoring the meters, gauging the melodicism or counting the verses, and in this sense, Comet Gain’s unexpected resurgence is scarcely half a shade less than a fucking grand achievement – both a painfully necessary reclamation of our current moment reflected through a sprawling, kaleidoscopic past, and a potent source of fuel for some way-fucking-worse moments yet to come.

Buy a download via bandcamp, buy on vinyl direct from Tapete, or listen in full via youtube.

Labels: album reviews, Comet Gain