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

So, this one has grown on me quite a lot since I wrote that review back in July.

In the cold light of day, it might not exactly be the strongest Comet Gain ever waxed, its missteps and indulgences may stand out bulbous and unflattering, but since when has this particular band ever thrived on clear-headed, “just-the-facts-ma’am” type critical listening?

More than ever these days, when their appeal lies in a woolly mixture of sentiment, personal nostalgia and cultural comfort, CG are a group whose music you’ve got to live with, and whose records must be allowed to interact with (your) life as it is lived.

Maybe I’m a tad biased, as disliking a Comet Gain LP at this stage feels like disowning a family member, but try throwing ‘Paperback Ghosts’ on in the background when you’re packing a suitcase for a long holiday, or after a few drinks when everyone else has gone to bed but you’re left awake with a bit of surplus energy, and I believe the virtues of even its ostensibly least successful songs will shine through loud and clear - a background burner, like all those lackadaisical classic rock albums you got frustrated with as a teenager, sitting there waiting for something exciting to happen, but that you now love dearly through some strange process of drunken osmosis, adulthood grit and emotional dust collection.

The virtues of the best songs here meanwhile are plain for all to see, and, due to the particular place they fell in my life, seem likely to always stay with me.

Listen to ‘Long After Tonite’s Candles Are Blown’ on Soundcloud, after which you will undoubtedly want to buy the album from Fortuna Pop.

Labels: best of 2014, Comet Gain

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

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 9


Fucking hell, FINALLY!

5. Bong – Beyond Ancient Space (Ritual Productions)

Yeah, I know – not much of a name is it? “Hey man, what shall we call our stoner doom band?” “How about… Bong!” Much like those indie bands who call themselves things like ‘Amplifier’ and ‘The Drums’, it doesn’t exactly fill one with hope regarding the imaginative breadth of the music within. I might have passed over this one, or else never noticed it at all, had some kind soul not recommended it to me one day. I’m very glad they did recommend it, and I would like to sincerely thanks them for the steer, because ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ is simply some of the best psychedelic music I’ve heard in years.

First track is a bit slow to get going, building up from silence with some ominous, Sunn 0)))-esque ritual incantation. Ho hum. Soon as the first roar of sub-bass hits and the drummer splutters into life though – whoa. All bets are off. Draw the curtains, lights off. Any fucker who dares phone or ring the doorbell in the next hour is gonna have to wait. This is gonna be epic.

Ostensibly still a doom metal album, ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ exists in similar proximity to its parent genre as Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey In Satchidananda’ does to jazz – using its skeleton merely as a basecamp from which to take off into uncharted realms of pure, blissful, bottomless psychedelia.

You know that bit in ‘Phantasm’, where Mike gets pulled through the Tall Man’s dimensional gateway and sees that column of mindless, hooded dwarves trudging across an endless expanse of red-lit desert by the light of a hazy, dying sun? You don’t? Well let’s pretend you do, and let’s imagine if, instead of a horrifying vision of a life of emotionally-stunted, death-ruled interplanetary drudgery, that had actually been really cool and he’d decided to go with it and join their ranks. That’s kind of what listening to the 25 minutes of ‘Onward To Perdonaris’ is like – a churning maelstrom of distortion, like some eternal death march across burning sands, whilst a forboding Eastern-tuned sitar/tamboura type riff shimmers overhead, heavily-phased open strings chiming like the bell of some phantasmagorical galleon.

Bypassing the assaultive/headache-inducing compression favoured by groups like Electric Wizard, Bong instead concentrate on summoning the more dynamic, analogue-ish widescreen dronescape beloved of Earth and Sleep – potentially muffled at low volumes, but completely overwhelming when cranked at a half-decent system, a form of diffuse obliteration that works particularly well when middle track ‘Across The Timestream’ hoves into view on the desert horizon.

By this stage, the undertow of bass feedback – hard to tell from whose cabinets it originated – has grown so monolithic that it proceeds to swallow the guitarist and bassist altogether, solidifying into a sound that’s less like a three piece rock band, more like a duet between the drummer and the endless roar of herculean thrusters powering some derelict, unmanned freighter through the depths of deep space.

I should say a few words about the drummer actually. Often, the demands of doom metal –especially in as extreme a form as this – can impose substantial limitations and challenges upon humble keepers of the beat, driving them either toward lumpen repetition or distracting experimentalism. Not this guy though – he’s swinging like John Bonham played back at quarter speed, and it’s beautiful. Listen to those cymbals crash!

Believe it or not, I’m pretty picky when it comes to my space-rock transcendence, but Bong win the gold medal. If this don’t send you, you probably didn’t want to go in the first place.

Looking on Youtube, I learn that, hilariously, these songs have ‘radio edits’. This isn’t one of them;





4. The Bats – Free All The Monsters (Flying Nun)

A band who have spent the best part of three decades whittling away at their particular brand of timeless indie-rock to without feeling any particular need to expand their horizons, different eras in The Bats’ back catalogue can best be differentiated by slight tweaking of the overall production aesthetic, from the FX-laden shoegaze of ‘Coachmaster’ to the more rustic, folksy timbres of ‘Daddy’s Highway’, with assorted stops at scenic viewpoints in-between.

‘Free All The Monsters’ then sees them returning to their spiritual home on the rejuvenated Flying Nun label with an album that initially veers somewhat toward the thin, reverb-drenched sound of ‘classic’ ‘80s British indie, sometimes even approaching a fabricated jangle akin to The Smiths or something. Thankfully, this problem can be easily rectified through the immoderate application of volume and EQ, which, as with many albums from the actual ‘80s, allows the true grandeur of the music to take flight.

Pushed to an appropriately ear-hurty level, the tangled sustain of Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward’s guitars assume their proper majesty, as their voices (teamed up more frequently, and more persuasively, than on previous records) wrap themselves elegantly around the slow, wise-owl phrasing of the strongest set of songs the band has written in recent memory or… hell, let’s just take the leap and say, ever.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I thought ‘The Guilty Office’ and ‘At The National Grid’ were plenty good, but almost every number here is a potential ‘greatest hits’ contender. Scott’s writing has retained a singularly high level of quality over the years, but he’s really upped the ante here, investing many of these songs with the kind of fiery, uncertain passion that usually tends to vanish from the work of settled/experienced rock bands as they glide through middle age. Correspondingly, the band seem to have been retooled to match their leader’s renewed vigour, letting rip with a kind of yearning, overdriven sprawl that pushes things a few steps further into the wilderness than was allowed within the contemplative, grown up homesteads of their last few records.

Even the more upbeat songs here – the lightweight jangle of ‘Simpletons’ and the disarmingly jaunty title cut - seem to be pushing back toward a comfort zone of grand, wistful despondence, an atmosphere in which a choice chord or cadence can transform lyrics that fall flat on paper - “And you know, I’ll take you with me / cos tomorrow’s a long, long time..” - into statements that move beyond the mere words into definitive, irreducible reflections on the nature of… something or other. And when the band really go with this mood and let rip on doleful epics like ‘Fingers of Dawn’ and ‘See Right Through Me’ (with it’s nod to Dylan’s implacable ‘I Shall Be Released’), the effect is stunning. You know those moments in songs like this, where they reach a big, Byronic climax at the end of a verse, and you’re like, ‘cue guitar solo!’, and the lead line crashes in just right and you’re like, yes? Well there’s a lot of that going on on the second half of this album.

Perhaps my favourite song is ‘On The Bank’, which blows things out to an almost Crazy Horse-like level of slow-burning grandeur, as Scott relates what appears to be the tale of a hazardous night-time sortie from some sort of seafaring vessel under hostile circumstances. Doubtless it’s all a big woolly emotional metaphor, but as is my want, I prefer to take these things literally. “treading water takes you down / and it’s good to have companions on the ground / though they may be more useful on the bank / to lend a hand.” Sound advice for any nautical disembarkation. Anyway, it’s a total epic, and I bloody love it.

Surely it can’t be just me who thinks that The Bats are better at making this kind of music than just about anyone else on earth? Can it really just be geographical distance and soft-spoken humbleness that’s denied them the chance to compete with the R.E.M.s and Teenage Fanclubs of this world? If you’re unfamiliar with their catalogue and am at all swayed by all my above nonsense, maybe 2012 might be a good year to investigation these propositions.





3. Peaking Lights – 936 (Not Not Fun / Domino)

Peaking Lights ‘Imaginary Falcons’ from 2010 was something real special – the primary achievement up to that point of the selected few (also see Blues Control and, uh… ) who were busy channelling the detritus of the past decade’s psyche/drone/noise hoo-hah into happy, harmonic, human realms. Now everybody with a pulse is doin’ that, and ‘936’ ably delivers on the next step of this music’s evolution so perfectly as to create its own self-sufficient universe, entirely ignorant of such pan-generic crit blather.

In an attempt to latch some space-filling blah onto this self-evidently wonderful music, writers have made much of Peaking Lights debt to dub, and indeed, whilst I’m not much of an expert on such things, stuff like Lee Perry’s sublime production work on ‘Heart of the Congos’ would seem to be as valid a reference point as any to work from here. Like Perry at his best, Idra Dunis and Aaron Coyes seem keen to apply experimental technique and DIY happenstance to the creation of music that is just, well…. irresistibly nice and comforting. As befits its rough production values and avant ancestry, each track here begins in slightly jarring fashion, pricking up our ears with a few seconds of rather harsh sounds and unheimlich rhythmic tics. Every time though, it takes only a few bars for us to fully internalise the song’s logic, for us to relax as we realise just how instinctively pleasing to human ears these sounds are. Peaking Lights is music to hang with. Music to be enveloped by. Music to render you happy and content in any situation. Homemade 21st century, post-everything lullabies.

Late last year, I wrote to a friend that ‘936’ is “..kind of electronic, kind of psychedelic, but with really good songs and beautiful melodies and cool bass lines too – like music cool parents would play to their babies to put them to sleep. I just play it all the time.”

And hopefully that’s about all you need to know really. It’s all I can think of to write, so it’d better be.





2. Milk Music – Beyond Living 12” (Perennial Death)

I shared some of my thoughts on Milk Music here, in August 2011.

I listened to mp3s of their 12” hundreds of times before that, and, now that I’ve finally got a physical copy, I’m gonna listen to it hundreds more.

Drawn on the subject of what my current favourite bands are, I recently found myself saying something of Milk Music along the lines of “they’re kind of a combination of everything that was great about rock music in the late ‘80s / early ‘90s”. I then almost immediately realised that this was a really fucking stupid and misleading thing to say, on any number of levels.

Because seriously, any of those acts that exists to pay professional homage to the Our Band Can Be Your Life ‘glory days’ of heritage indie-rock, playing to the same crowds who go to those abysmal ATP ‘play the album all the way through’ nights, can fuck right off. I mean, I know I’m usually pretty retrogressive in my music taste, but I’d like to think I’ve developed at least some sense of good taste along with it. Go! Leave me! Take me off your PR’s mailing list! You’re about as cool as someone playing aesthetically correct Grateful Dead-style hippie rock in 1982, and you know it. Get outta my face.

Milk Music are not like that. They are not cool because they sound like Dinosaur and The Wipers and Black Flag. They are cool because they are as good as them, at a time when pretty much nobody else is. End of.

“Political angst will never flow / in the dark where the real feelings grow” – like, what the hell does that even mean? I don’t know man, but he sounds like he means it! Remember when angry guys with loud guitars could pull that sorta thing and get away with it? DUCK, Milk Music coming through!

The sticker on the front of this 12” in Rough Trade said something like “as tipped by NME, Pitchfork etc…”, so I guess the moment has passed and they’ll be making concept albums about lightbulb factories by this time next year. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Rock music in 2011, thy name was Milk Music.





1. Comet Gain – Howl of the Lonely Crowd (Fortuna Pop)

Well it was foregone conclusion really, wasn’t it. Having spent months earlier this year banging away about Comet Gain in preparation for their latest magnum opus, I could scarcely have made anything else No # 1 could I?

With all those unwise words already up in digital print, I guess I probably don’t need to restate the fact that every LP Comet Gain have released since 2000’s ‘Tigertown Pictures’ has had a huge amount to me, each one becoming a veritable cornerstone of my musical being. Over five years in the making (so to speak – I mean, I’m sure many of those years weren’t exactly spent ‘in the making’), and on first impression ‘Howl..’ certainly doesn’t disappoint. If anything, it’s perhaps the most ballsy and immediate record the band has ever made – a loud, lengthy and unapologetic restatement of all the thematic and musical concerns that CG and their fans have held dear through the intervening years.

Opener ‘Clang of the Concrete Swans’ certainly leaves little room for uncertainty, a stream of consciousness, state-of-the-nation-address of a song that thunders along like a 21st century update of one of those epic mid ‘60s Dylan tracks. Only, y’know, better, and more relevant, and with cool sounding guitars, and a beat and stuff. Recklessly veering between the teeth-grinding frustrations of poverty-stricken urban drudgery and curdled cries of adolescent rebellion, it’s an astonishing-bordering-on-ridiculous statement of intent; “oh, be young, be someone / be someone rebel, vicious, dumb”.

This is by far the most professionally produced album CG have ever done (not that it matters), as is exemplified on the track 2 & 3 double-header of potential singles ‘Weekend Dreams’ and ‘An Arcade From The Rain’, wrecking ball pop songs that cement the record’s default palette of monster guitar tone, monster bass tone and domineering New Order style keys.

(Initially ‘Weekend Dreams’ had me a bit non-plussed, because I was used to listening to the earlier version released on a split single with Hello Cuca (reviewed here). Basically, for the album cut they’ve taken a bit that turned up as a coda in the final choruses of the first draft (the whole “I’ve got a cheap desire to be..” thing) and turned almost the entire song into it, losing a lot of good material in the process. Still though, that’s their prerogative, and once I got used to it I love the spirited performance of the new one too.)

And incidentally, if you’re not already a Comet Gain fan but still took an active interest in that bracketed paragraph, chances are you’re the kind of person who probably should be a Comet Gain fan, as David Feck’s bottomless obsession with pop cult ephemera proves as rich a source of material here as it ever has done, his ever-growing gallery of until-recently unsung loser-heroes swelled with new recruits, from proto-beatnik junkie-thief Herbert Huncke to former Fall keyboard player Una Baines, ‘This Sporting Life’ protagonist Frankie Machine, Dixon Steele from Nicholas Ray’s ‘In a Lonely Place’ and the proprietors of Berlin industrial label SPK. Thee ecstatic library indeed.

In what I think might be its third recorded outing, ‘Herbert Huncke’ is finally nailed here, assuming the rattling VU pastiche New York subway sound type proportions it’s always been aiming for, muscular production, spirited ‘woo woos’ and a great noise guitar solo finally overcoming the incongruity of a mild-mannered English guy delivering lines like “you motherfucker / where is my bread”. The SPK track, ‘Working Circle Explosive’, is great too – a flaming clarion call of Baader Meinhof punker discontent, fuelled by sloganeering non-sequitur lyrics and some even more ferocious multi-layered fuzz.

At the heart of the record though, ‘The Ballad of Frankie Machine’ is simply an incredible track, encapsulating everything about this band that has meant so much to me. On this song, this one here, you can see… what exactly? Beyond all the back story and the shambolic live shows and cult following and all other nonsense, simply a band who can achieve something like this, who can play these tangled guitars and make them sound like a shadow falling back across the whole 20th century’s history of betrayals and heartbreaks, who can fuse the personal and the political into a sharp, bloody lump, who after many, many, many listens can still make my stomach twists in knots as Rachel sings “my best suit on, out with the boys tonight / don’t wake me up I might be dead..”.

The disparity between such intensity and the sloppy, melancholy acoustic numbers that have been a big part of CG’s repertoire at least since ‘City Fallen Leaves’ may irk some, but for those of us prepared to go the whole distance, there is beauty to be found even in these rambling, drunk-at-3am half-songs that scarcely any other band in history could get away with, as ‘After Midnight..’ and ‘Some Of Us Don’t Want To Be Saved’ are pulled back across the line by the sheer force of Feck’s need to communicate with us the totality of his whole whatever, the band’s epic, chiming swing driving the compositions forward as they take on the mantle of lovelorn grandeur of David’s beloved Go-Betweens; “It’s the small things that keep us alive / the coded souvenirs, left of the dial”. Stirs the blood, I tell ya. What’s that, wordcount? Another thousand words down the can? Worth every comma.

It’s hard to say how ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ will fit into the pantheon quite yet. It’s taken a long time – years upon years of obsessive listening – for the previous LPs to reveal their true worth as they collide with life experience and coagulate into shiny, strange, twisted, inoperable lumps in my psyche. Maybe I’ll completely forget about this album by February. Maybe I’ll play it at least once a week until the day I die. Either way, for the moment it certainly sounds like a really fucking good album, and that’s a good start on the road to immortality.

Labels: best of 2011, Bong, Comet Gain, Milk Music, Peaking Lights, The Bats

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

The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 4.

FINALLY. You’ll forgive me my inadvertent summer holiday. More hiatus to come I’m afraid, but let’s throw this out there before it gets silly.
Be advised: following post contains drunkenness.

V.



“This ain’t a band, it’s a heartache,
This ain’t a song, it’s a fuck-up”
- Cinema Red & Blue, ‘Jesse Lee Kincaid’

Comet Gain’s follow-up to ‘Realistes’, ‘City Fallen Leaves’, came out in late ‘05/early ’06 I think, and I’d already listened to it to the point of oblivion before I moved to London in late 2006. But inevitably perhaps, it’s a record I most strongly associate with my first year or two in the capital, so let’s skip over initial impressions and all that (thank christ) and pick things up there.

On one level, ‘City..’ is an album full of immediate hit songs, with far brighter, louder production than any previous CG release. Look: they even went to Brighton and made a VIDEO for opening track ‘Fists in my Pocket’, and whilst they’re down a member down and looking a bit hungover, it’s a surprisingly straightforward ‘look, we’re an indie band, this is our video for our song’ kinda proposition.



Pretty good song, huh? Another one of those aforementioned ‘Amazing Hit Songs’. Fuck me, just listen to the way David and Rachel spit the consonants on “..pocket”.

At the same time though, ‘City Fallen Leaves’ also functions as a big, spiked bundle of failure and disappointment, and desperate attempts to deal with such, framed within the soul-grinding context of life in London after the hope one initially invests in the city’s thin promise of bohemian riches has long since curled up in the corner and died.

It’s also a record being bled dry by nostalgia – full of songs aching for friends and scenes long departed, replaced by… what? Crying over old mixtapes and all that shit.

A few years after the forward-marching statement of intent that was ‘Realistes’, it seems the battle hasn’t gone too well.

Although it could be easily misconstrued as some kind of ‘tribute’ to London, ‘..Fallen Leaves’ sounds frankly like the work of a man who’s fucking sick to death of it. As a newcomer to the big, ugly, unwelcoming city myself, wondering why I’d go to such trouble just to call an insufferable place like this ‘home’, I fell back endlessly on the double-header of ‘Daydream Scars’ and ‘Bored Roar’. Simple and loud – perfect punk rock songs - full of futility and utter fury; cursed frustrations of banging your head against this deadening banality between every bus stop, drawing an arc between park bench haunting maniacs and dead eyed clowns in leather jackets, paying £4.50 a pint to stand in the rain cos there’s no space inside, reassuring each other that this is where it’s all going down.



“So bored, with static you will never change/
Bored with how are you and let’s do this again”

Through dozens of dark, pissed off journeys back through early morning South London, these tunes were where it was all going down - still would be probably, if I still bothered hauling myself off every weekend, in search of something I couldn’t quite name but inevitably fail to find. Where was I coming back from? I don’t even remember. Wherever it was, it can’t have been much fun. At least now, unlike the narrator of some of the ‘City Fallen Leaves’ songs, I’ve come to an understanding with the city – experienced enough in how to live here that I know the people, the places, the memories, the journeys that I’m comfortable with, and I can usually stick with them without yearning for something more; secure in the knowledge that every time I go central I’ll wonder why I fucking bothered; aware that I’d probably be happier drifting down the Thames in a barrel than scamming ‘round Soho after midnight trying to get a bus. So it was and so it ever shall be – hating stuff and avoiding places in what this city’s all about, as befits the capital of a nation as belligerent and neurotic as our own.

Then again though, I’m an optimist. So before I lose the thread and get all Peter Ackroyd on your ass, let me admit that I found myself in exactly the situation described in the preceding paragraph this very evening. And this time ‘round, it was fine. ‘City Fallen Leaves’ all the way back was sounding good. It’s an album I can very rarely listen to sober in the daytime these days, just because it’s all a bit too… y’know. If you don’t get what I’m going on about with this band though, here’s a tip: head out to Soho, drink about six hours worth of whatever slop’s going, scour the streets for more, catch the 436 to Deptford Bridge at 2am and put them on yr headphones. (Mr . Feck is very much is very much a North London partisan I realise, but some difference, y’know.)

It was this aspect of Comet Gain’s appeal that first inspired me to draw a comparison with that other great band who only ever truly make sense on drunken forced marches and Night Buses – The Mekons. Not the most obvious reference point perhaps, but compare & contrast in terms of ideals, attitude, musical execution, personalities, membership policy, rabid cult fanbase and general public ignorance etc, and I think you’ll find it’s all there. Felt like a fairly odd line to draw when I first threw it out there in a review a couple of years back, but I’ve seen it popping up in a couple of other places subsequently, which is nice - hopefully proves I’m not entirely off the mark. Plus: Comet Gain don’t wear stupid hats or utilise accordions (not yet anyway), thus making their music far more palatable whilst in mixed company, but retaining the same disgraceful power and wild abandon. Result.

But look: I really can’t do the full bit on ‘City Fallen Leaves’ right now. I’ve get too much silly shit tied up with it, it’s all too… y’know. I’d rather talk about surf music, or metal, or something. Can we have that conversation instead? Do you know ‘Thunder Reef’ by the Bobby Fuller four? What a tune. Have you heard that mp3 that was doing the rounds of all the between song banter from a Venom concert edited together? Hilarious. Let’s go from there.

I mean, what the fuck am I supposed to say about ‘Ballad of a Mixtape’ by this stage, for fuck’s sake…? I couldn’t even begin. It’s ridiculous. It must be like being some wounded veteran of the American War of Independence, hearing the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ for the first time. I mean, gimme a break.

“Unwilling to bend our knees, but willing to burst into flame
In Washington State, or in New Cross Gate”

(Gotta love the local reference though.)

Anyone who is in any way involved with the kind of stuff I write about on this blog, just listen, and we’ll all salute at funerals in the rain together, alright?



Here’s the accompanying panel from the CD booklet, that I scanned (at work when nobody was looking) and posted back in May 2006. Click to enlarge and let it tell the story cos I’m not going to.


Back with our next thrilling instalment before you know it.

Labels: Comet Gain

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

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