When a band's name fits its sound almost perfectly, further critical unpacking seems painfully superfluous. Perhaps comparable to an early '90s Blackjack cut-out, a gas-huffing Acid Mothers Temple, Monoshock-- especially the 1996 opus Walk To The Fire-- or an amphetamine-dosed Blue Cheer, the Santa Cruz quartet Comets on Fire creates sonic defibrillation through burning patch cords, distended Echoplex and endless reserves of frenetic rock-n-roll zeal; at their best, the jams are so all-encompassing and tightly suffocating, they let off a visionary flair, lighting up the nighttime sky of modern garage rock dreck, akin to the time you stumbled across the off-kilter pawnshop halo surrounding 13th Floor Elevators, or the freeform hippie stargazing of Angus Maclise's Brain Damage in Oklahoma City.
The band certainly deserves this reissue of its out-of-print 2001, vinyl-only debut, and the venerable Alternative Tentacles does one better, generously including six additional, sprawling songs recorded during a howling, raw concert in 2000 (and pre-dating last year's more eclectically tweaked Field Recordings From the Sun [Ba Da Bing!]). Here, the sprawl doesn't dig paths into Ben Chasny's No Six Organs of Admittance psych prettiness; instead, the band fixates on an endless dose of desperate, over-amplified histrionics, fronted by a distorted martyr with rocks in his mouth. Blustering through more 4-channel explosions than most can probably handle in a single sitting, Comets on Fire avoids slowing down the action or turning down the ear-fracturing skree for over an hour: gilt feedback connects, extends, and exudes, dangling from the ceiling as shiny, fractured stalactites.
Starting the proper album off a-squealin', "All I Need" is an acid-rock, noise version of tuning, until some seconds into the track, when the various threads of feedback stitch together and bang forward into a washed-out, garbled rock anthem. Ethan Miller's voice-- as outer-limits as his guitar-- treads the waves beyond all the distortion, only allowing brief glances at a few stranded words about grave robbers in love, cosmic ghosts, and miasmatic plagues. Really, though, actual verbal comprehension is secondary to the full-on atmosphere the band constructs: they focus on patterning, momentary pauses, dynamics, and you're left waiting for the roof to cave in under the barometric pressure. The great thing about the echoplex is the way it spreads over any potential blank spaces during the course of the album, like the splatter painting of Pollock spun askew through some centrifugal fuck-up. After the opener, the brief hand-clapped raga "Rimbaud Blues" is the only sustained breakdown until the album's end.
The live show begins following a two-minute pause at the end of "Days of Vapors", the final, gloriously decomposed track from the original self-titled LP. Like a lot of low-fidelity music recorded in boomy rooms, this concert material is high on the high-end and shrill. Miller's vocals, unfortunately, have too much presence here, losing the denser growl of the album, sometimes congealing enough to make sense. All in all, the live material lacks the fullness of the other recordings (the drums sound super tinny) and perhaps offers some glances at cracks in the astronauts' armor. As with Modest Mouse's Interstate 8 EP, also featuring a demo set appended, after a couple listens I forgot to wait for the fuzzier, less interesting material and just edited the bad parts out.
While Comets on Fire does lack those ponderous Opeth-textured moments of Field Recordings From the Sun, its unrelenting snarled beastliness is one hell of a sonic whoop-ass, outclassing-- by a solar system-- most of the over-the-top rock music I've heard thus far in 2003. Skip the live stuff, and you'll never come down.
