Interlude: Five-Oh-Oh.

I’m sure we all need a break from this Comet Gain stuff by now. I’ve been spending a few days listening to – wow, get this - other music before I launch into the next bit.

And conveniently enough, we have an anniversary to mark in the meantime. Blogger Dashboard tells me that this thing what you are currently reading is the 500th post on Stereo Sanctity.

I guess 500 posts in seven and a bit years is nothing to shout about in blog terms, but if my calculations are correct (they’re probably not) I reckon it averages out at about one post per six days since May 2004 – a far better breakdown than I was expecting, given my frequent failure to get a post done at least once a week and irregular lapses into unexpected hiatus over the years.

By way of celebration, I’ve tidied up the dead wood in the links list a bit – never let it be said I don’t know how to party. So what does the future hold for what history will record as the distinctly-turn-of-the-century medium of the Music Blog? Fuck all, if the number of decent ones still standing is any indication, but a desert can be a cool place to be, so I’ll keeping plugging away.

For no reason whatsoever, I will dedicate the rest of this post to revisiting a video I’ve already posted once before, from Kuwait’s The Bendaly Family, just because it never fails to fill my heart with joy.

So much to love going on here, but I would in particular draw your attention to;

1. The way this video seems to suggest a fully formed Wes Anderson-style movie, all about the way that starry-eyed Mr Bendaly has coerced his wife and daughters (and nieces? sisters? who knows..) into becoming his backing band as he pursues his goal of international pop stardom. Participation, you feel, is compulsory in this family – anyone who lacks rudimentary musical talent, well they’ll just have to clap their hands, or do some dancing!

2. Also playing into this imagined motion picture is the way in which The Bendaly Family manage to totally rock the idea of vintage/indie dress codes and contemporary wimp/girl/amateur-friendly pop performance aesthetics… in Kuwait in 1978.

3. Above all though, I just really love the way that this song is actually three completely separate songs with wholly conflicting moods, crudely crowbarred together with no attempt at all to disguise the joins – first the forlorn, political angst-ridden “those guys who cause all the trouble” section, then the sexy “do you love me?” belly-dancing bit, then the big, wholesome “la la la” pop chorus. Mr Bendaly’s jaunty ‘I’m goin’ for a walk’ arm swinging move as he introduces the latter section, singing “when I go… etc”, is just the greatest thing.

Actually, checking back, those are pretty much exactly the same observations that I made when I first posted the video in August ’09… but hopefully they bear repeating.

I guess it is the fact that just about every country on earth has a wealth of stuff this awesome buried in its culture – so much so that after decades of obsessive immersion I’m nowhere near even hitting bottom on my own particular corners of closer-to-home Anglo-American pop music – that keeps me doing this crap five hundred ‘publish now’ clicks later.

Labels: anniversaries, The Bendaly Family

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

The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 1.

As I write, a copy of Comet Gain’s first album in seven years is awaiting collection from the post office. (That's not a picture of it above, obvs.) By this stage, the cycle of anticipation has doubled back on itself and I’m scarcely anticipating it at all. After so many years, so much obsession and projection and heartache and weird, creepy sound-ownership poured into their previous LPs, the existence of a new one to sit alongside those tablets of the lore just seems ridiculous. Whatever is on it, it will disappoint, initially at least. It will take time for it to work its way into the pantheon. It will take beer and stubbed toes and hungover journeys to work. It will get there eventually.

As ‘The Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ sits in the sorting office then, the time seems nigh for me to step up and launch into my Big Comet Gain Post. Think of it as an attempt to examine the way this sporadically active British rock band – whose name you could probably yell in a busy record shop anywhere in the world without eliciting a glimmer of recognition – have infiltrated my life and thought to such a degree over the past decade that… well, I don’t even know how to end that sentence. A lot of drunken walks home, a lot of nights crammed into insalubrious music venues, a lot of personal upsets and snap decisions, a lot of rambling letters and purchases of records and books and movie tickets, would all have been very different without the music of Comet Gain. And, in general, they’d have been a lot less fucking good too, I’d wager.

I’m afraid you’re going to have to bear with me quite a bit on this one. It’s gonna be split into several sections, and I’m going to try to present information and thoughts and visuals in a way that’s roughly in line with when I acquired them. This band were very mysterious to me for a long time, before I eventually had the good fortune to find myself living in a city where they were playing semi-regular gigs, and for a lot of their fans I’d imagine they are mysterious still. More than is usually considered sensible these days, they seem like a band still dedicated to forcing their way to immortality via blurry photos, random pronouncements, distant rumours and general uncertainty, and that’s something I’d like to try to reflect.

So hey, let’s take this in numbered sections, with quotes, like a H.P. Lovecraft story or something, shall we? Yeah, that sounds like fun.

I.

“We started as a joke and idea, we played broken songs on broken amps and cardboard drums and it never got much more professional. We believed in obsolete things and passionate hearts and still do and made these records from our hearts to yours for whatever it was and still is and could be. Never die, up the workers and all that. DCF”

- sleeve note, ‘Broken Record Prayers’ compilation, 2009

Nobody told me to listen to Comet Gain. I never heard them on the radio, or read about them in the press. Even ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, whose shambolically utopian post-riot grrl aesthetic agenda and nexus of editorial/band member allegiances would you’d think have provided the perfect vehicle for plentiful Comet Gain coverage, somehow forgot to tell me about them. Instead, my discovery of the band was wholly accidental, mediated through my pre-download era trawling of chain store clearout bins, in search of something, anything that might be worth listening to.

Somewhere between the age of about eighteen and twenty, whilst indulging in this unsavoury, vulture-like activity, I found myself in the middle of an unexpectedly fucking brilliant clearance sale in the Brighton branch of Borders. Subsequently, I have learned that none other than CTCL editor Everett True spent some time working in a managerial capacity at Borders (this branch, presumably), following his departure from the mainstream music press and prior to his founding of the aforementioned publication. Thus it’s my theory that what I was actually experiencing here was the shop’s attempt to rid itself of all the unsellable stock he’d ordered in. But regardless – the fact is that for a poor kid without access to even dial-up internet, the chance to actually pick up discs by the mysterioso likes of Flying Saucer Attack, The Make Up and The 13th Floor Elevators for £1 a pop was extremely exciting.

And amongst their number… COMET GAIN. What the hell is that? Never heard of ‘em. WHAT a great name a band though, and the cover (some sort of endlessly photocopied still from a Jean Luc Godard movie chopped up inside big yellow and orange boxes or something) looked cool as shit, so I went for it.



I guess with a name like that I naturally assumed they’d be a psychedelic band of some kind. Maybe some Stereolab kinda deal. Y’know, like they were probably jamming in the studio and were all like ‘uh, so chaps, I think we need a name’, and they got it from one of their pedals, or a knob on a weird Japanese reverb unit or something. In hindsight, I suspect this name origin story is about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get. In fact, I’d venture to suggest that the sort of muso gear-nerd fetishism that an assumption like that might imply is exactly the kind of thing Comet Gain stand against. Something they exist to spit in the face of, even! I doubt David Feck even knows the name of the single rusty stomp-box he plugs his Japanese Rickenbacker copy into on-stage. And that’s something to be proud of, damn it! I mean, d’you think Swell Maps or The Clean or The Raincoats had time to caress their fucking mass-produced electronic gizmos and build fucking pedalboards whilst they were busy wringing out the raw energy of youth that was running through their bones, capturing it in the form of random, frantic eternal racket before it soured, dedicating every second to feeling autonomous and alive…? (That’s a rhetorical question - don't answer it.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So yeah: I still don’t know why they’re called Comet Gain. But it’s still a great name. And on the back of this CD, which was called ‘Tigertown Pictures’, on a label called ‘Where It’s At Is Where You Are’ Records, there’s a tiny little square of faces – too small to really make out much detail -introducing the members of the band. Being the sad bastard I am, I probably scrutinised this in detail before I even put the CD on. ‘Kay’ – identifiable from her picture as female and Asian – played bass. ‘Rachel’ did ‘vox’. Some bloke I can’t remember the name of played the drums. Everything else was the remit of one ‘d. christian’ (male, no caps), who also took all the songwriting credits. I was sorta annoyed that this was a band with girls in, and yet the bloke had written all the songs and basically done everything. I was like that back then.

I can’t clearly remember what my first impressions were when I put ‘Tigertown Pictures’ on. I know it wasn’t an instant hit – I remember finding its sound thin and headachey and generally off-putting. But back in those days, you paid your money and took yr choice, y’know, so I kept putting the CD on regardless, and eventually it must have clicked. I remember thinking ‘oh, right, they’re an indie band’ – ‘indie’ in the sense that The Yummy Fur or Boyracer were ‘indie’ that is – scratchy and murky, with fluffed lyrics that you can’t quite hear properly, but with a certain undeniable passion about what they’re doing that keeps you listening regardless. And a certain fury too. Yeah, that was the hook for me maybe.

II.

The first Comet Gain song that really made an impression on me was ‘Record Collection’, the opener on ‘Tigertown Pictures’. Bloody hell, I thought, they may be an indie band, but they’re the most furious indie band I’ve heard in my life. The metallic clang of that guitars, the ranting, unguarded vocal delivery… the only thing in my limited musical vocabulary I could really compare this sort of fury to was Shellac’s ‘Prayer to God’. Even though it’s not very much like it at all, nothing else within my reach really seemed an apt reference point.

In essence, the song is a simple-bordering-on-dumb idea that just about any other band in the world would probably have played out as a tongue-in-cheek mess-around – a chorus declaring “I don’t wanna hear your record collection in my brain anymore”, contrasted with verses in which the singer lists songs and artists he can’t face anymore, presumably because they remind him of time spent with his ex. Y’know, you can imagine it can’t you – a singsong-y girl group beat and a bunch of eyebrow raising cultural reference points. Fair enough. The situation is clearly no fucking joke for d.christian however, his ripped-to-fuck guitar constantly lunging ahead of the beat and having to double back on itself as he launches into a semi-improvised tirade of startling venom, declaring that “all musicians are a disgrace, disfigured, misinformed and rotten!” and “rock n’ roll’s a cancer in my lungs!”, in-between spitting out his rejection of “spiked guitars and Eno produced shit!”.

As you might expect, the song’s a bit of a mess, a kind of tantrum-like outburst that feels like it’s been pieced together haphazardly from several takes. The band rarely revisit it live, and you probably won’t listen to my Soundcloud upload and be blown away or anything. But for a first-time listener unaccustomed to the ways of this band, something about it was fairly extraordinary. Something about the way this ‘d.christian’ throws caution to the wind in his vocal delivery, rejecting the slurs and sneers and mumbles expected of an ‘indie’ vocalist, as he instead tries to hurl his cracked, white-boy voice in the direction of the kind of catharsis an American soul singer might pull out of the this material, straining to hit notes his lungs can’t even conceive of, as if he’d stormed down to the studio (assuming this sonic disaster of an album ever saw the inside of a studio) straight after hurling said record collection at his lover’s tearful head.

There is something about ‘Record Collection’ that maybe gets to heart of why I started to relate to Comet Gain so strongly – mainly I think, the idea of a band that refused to write this stuff off as a joke, of a singer who wasn’t ashamed to admit that the idea of not being able to listen to The Beach Boys or Dexy’s Midnight Runners anymore wasn’t just a wistful ‘moving on’ experience, it was a fucking holocaust. It seemed a brave thing to admit, something we can all connect to to some extent, but would never be able to scream in song, putting our obsessions and weaknesses on display like that. Even ten years ago, I could see what an excessive, lunatic thing the song essentially is, but can any of us music fans truly say we don’t get some kind of vicarious thrill of recognition from the uncertain voice after the fury has died down that repeats, “will you still love me tomorrow / when I show you the track of my tears?”, as the impotent, amp-scraping feedback fades away behind him? At that point I think, the connection was made.

Labels: Comet Gain