It's funny when history repeats itself backwards. In the late 1970s, the scourge of all God-fearing long-hairs was the specter of their favorite rock bands going disco-- which, regardless of whether it resulted in a swaggering Stones classic or a turgid Rod Stewart atrocity, was a seen as horrific compromise of the band's integrity. VHS or Beta, meanwhile, seem interested in charting the opposite path. The band came out of Louisville five years back with an EP that practically hemorrhaged gleeful disco-house exuberance; even the title, Le Funk, seemed calculated to push the buttons of any Daft Punk nerd with latent rock inclinations. But each successive record has pushed them further towards a more commercially viable (and more familiar) status-quo identity. 2004's Night on Fire was a decent-enough Duran Duranish indie-dance record dropped at a time when decent-enough Duran Duranish indie-dance records were given away free in boxes of Count Chocula, and Bring on the Comets compromises their groove even more with further awkward excursions into over-earnest nu-wave.
Asking a rock band with a good rhythm section to play dance music's a lot more natural than taking a dance act and nudging them towards college-via-arena rock, and most of Bring on the Comets hews pretty closely to the predictable outcome: pile on the synths and the bass and you get an endearing if unadventurous type of pop, but the further out front the guitars are, the more rote the song actually sounds. It goes downhill fast after the Thin Lizzy-guitar-augmented house throb of 68-second red herring opener "Euglama" fades out: "Love in My Pocket" churns along bloodlessly, banking on its skittery, skinny-tie twitch-rhythm to maintain a song that feels inert everywhere else, lyrics included ("I got whatcha want, if you want/ Come and get it" isn't a line just anyone can pull off). Too bad it diverts all its energy to a tepid indie-pop jangle instead of cultivating any actual bass in the backbeat. The title track has similar problems, draining all the low end out and gambling everything it has on a guitar that soars just about high enough to brush against the stratospheric heights of, say, post-Roger Waters Pink Floyd. And despite the dampened 4/4 beat that opens it, "The Stars Where We Came From" isn't so much a dance track as it is a holding hands and swaying slightly while staring upwards track, especially when it disintegrates its groove to let an overproduced steel guitar-and-piano interlude barrel through like a big pompous freight train.
The album also happens to be tied together by all kinds of ostentatious spot-the-influence moments most retro-leaning hey-remember-the-80s bands are smart enough to dial down a bit. There's not much to do besides deconstruct the blueprint of a track when all you're really left with are clearly-labeled moments marked "U2 riff" or "Cure melody" or "Depeche mode vocal affectation." The latter's especially egregious: on "Burn it All Down" and "Time Stands Still", Craig Pfunder's vocals resemble the Muppet version of Dave Gahan. Or at least the Brandon Flowers version. Same difference, I guess. Not like Gahan or Flowers or most of the Muppets would sound right singing emptily edgy non-statements like "We'll burn their flags, burn their house, burn the churches/ Burn it all down" anyhow. (Apologies if that transcript's inaccurate; Pfunder's throaty faux-Brit mumblings make "we'll" indistinguishable from "well" and "their" sound exactly like "the".) And here's everything else you need to know about the lyrics: they were put together using an incomplete Ric Ocasek magnetic poetry kit.
It was a mistake for VHS or Beta to subjugate their dance beat into a perfunctory structure for the guitars to smash against; the riffs sound like they're there for their own sake, biding their time and waiting for a moment of catchiness that never really arrives. (Where's Nile Rodgers when you need him?) They're still a rhythmically sound band, and every once in a while a chorus pops up that actually sounds a bit exciting-- even if, as in "She Says", it largely hinges on the phrase "doo doo doo doo doo". But the good bits are hard to define through the arena-rock interference, sort of like the scrambled cable porn evoked by the cover art. Bring on the Comets doesn't prove that good rock is harder to make than good disco, just that it's a lot easier to make boring.
