Field Recordings from the Sun starts off like the next drum circle over from the No-Neck Blues Band-- congas, singing bowl, "heaven bells", "camel bells", and other contraptions rattle over the horizon like a VW bus full of chandeliers. But that's just the intro: it suddenly drops off and you're hit by a screeching, high-end rock assault. A pounding rhythm section bursts in, followed by bare-chested, doped-up rock-god vocals, and more than anything, guitars-- lots of them, grinding, screeching, scratching, and wrung through effects and oscillation. And for the whole rest of the album, that's all you get. But isn't that enough?
The craziest astro-named band since Uranus & The Five Moons, Comets on Fire plays noise/psychedelic/space-rock. You'll hear many familiar sounds and riffs, but the band jumbles them up and cranks them so high they sound fresh again; and they also have a kind of trademark in their excessive use of Echoplex, a delay and echo device that dates back to the early days of rock. It's the main job of one guy, Noel Harmonson, just to work the Echoplex and oscillations through which the Comets run the guitars and the vocals. This makes a sound that's not unlike being screamed at through a fifty-foot cardboard tube.
Field Recordings is their second album, after a self-titled limited edition debut that got attention for its fierce cover of "Back in the U.S.S.R." This follow-up is just as nasty but much more involved: where the debut was sharp, terse and loud as fuck, Field Recordings is sprawling, massive, and loud as fuck. There are four guys in the band: Harmonson, guitarist and singer Ethan Miller, the awesomely named Utrillo Belcher (his business cards actually read "Potsie U. Belcher") on drums, and Ben Flashman on bass-- and they're joined by over half a dozen guests. Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance and the Fucking Champs' Tim Green (who also produced the album) guest on guitar, and on "Beneath the Iceage", there's a handful of people who just drink, chant and shake stuff.
Chasny also writes one of the songs: "The Unicorn", much as Shel Silverstein did for the Irish Rovers. This, the album's shortest and only quiet tune starts as a folky acoustic ballad until it's crept up on by a bunch of overdubbed electrics. (The liner notes call them "electric floating guitar", "electric destruction guitar"... hell, I don't even need my thesaurus to write this review.) Picture finding a grove full of hobbits and smashing them all with a hammer.
But this is just an intermission compared to the other songs. Lean even at six-to-ten minutes each, the tracks are carefully arranged pieces coated with mess. The spontaneity of the playing belies the deliberate transitions, like the jerky end of "ESP" or the controlled breakdown into electric splatter on "Black Poodle". The guitars and electronics that scribble out the end of that track spill through a suburban guitar shop's worth of excessive gadgetry: this is definitely one of album's high points.
You won't hum these tracks on your way to work, and who knows what the lyrics are-- never mind if they're any good. However, next time, Comets on Fire could bring in more variety. They might even turn down the volume a couple more times, you know, for artistic effect. Still, as a pure assault, this album's terrifically brutal and single-minded: with far better distribution than their debut, it'll be most people's introduction to the band, and it makes an awesome first impression.
