Comets On Fire - Blue Cathedral (2004)

Comets On Fire have elbowed aside all my plans for a while now, the overdriven genius of Blue Cathedral drawing me back time after time while other stuff stacks up unlisten to.

When I've not been playing it on the turntable I've been blasting it out on CD in the car, which isn't a great idea because it's hard not to floor the accelerator and blaze away towards the nearest coast. Mind you, from our house that would be Southport, which definitely isn't the kind of destination the Comets had burning in their collective mind's eye when they gouged out this steaming Rorschach inkblot of rock'n'roll viscera.

The apparent noise and fury that belch out of the speakers when you first listen to Blue Cathedral soon reveal themselves to be something a whole lot more nuanced. It's the balance between mayhem and melody, between chaos and control that really sinks its teeth into you.

Blue Cathedral is the album MC5 should have made after Kick Out The Jams, instead of succumbing to smack and the paltry pub rock ambitions of producer John Landau when they went into the studio to make Back In The USA. Had they just kept alive their love of Sun Ra and righteous love of warped psychedelia while discovering a whole raft of new guitar pedals...

Comets On Fire had released two previous (official) albums; the muddy blitzkrieg of their self-titled debut in 2001 and the following year's slightly less lo-fi but still highly noise orientated Field Recordings From The Sun. Noel Von Harmonson is largely credited on 'echoplex', his primary duty being to distort guitars, keyboards and most of all Ethan Miller's vocals, with his screams, wails and moans further warped beyond all recognition. The results are kind of noise rock, kind of weirdly psychedelic and shot through unlikely moments of rock classicism - an unholy mess, in other words, but an enjoyable one.

Guitar polymath Ben Chasny (best known for his work as Six Organs Of Admittance) stepped onboard for one track on Field Recordings... and the Comets persuaded him to stick around in a full-time capacity for Blue Cathedral. The idea was to add light and shade via Chasny's virtuosity, even though he complained in a Pitchfork interview that "I don't want to be the Six Organs... guy who brought in a pretty melody. I did the acoustic moments on the records but always under protest. In Comets I'd rather destroy".

Adding touches of acoustic guitar and quieter moments to go with the blunderbuss riffs and hysterical shreddage was smart enough but the Comets also upped their game massively when it came to production. It was still them and Fucking Champs dude Tim Green behind the mixing desk but suddenly they no longer sounded like the whole thing has been ripped off a badly recorded tape - now everything had burst into crazy DayGlo Technicolour.

The cover of Blue Cathedral features an elephant's eye staring out at you, offering fair warning of the massively heavy presence within. Opening track The Bee And The Cracking Egg (all the Comets albums are worth buying for their track titles alone) fires straight off with Ben Flashman's bass and Utrillo Kushner's pounding drums before Miller's warped vocals exhort, plead and demand that we do, well, something or other that probably involves expanding our consciousness and shaking off these earthly shackles, or such like. At this point, Von Harmonson unleashes what sounds like a raygun straight from Mars Attacks! and everyone piles in, with Miller's and Chasny's guitars howling as the whole song lurches up at you like a giant cartoon mud monster, which isn't a sentence I get to write often enough. Moments of Sonic Youth style detuning do battle with an absolute beast of a riff while Chasny's guitar wails furiously and there's even a brief interlude of gentle loveliness before it eventually collapses into exhaustion after seven and a half glorious, glorious minutes. Ah, sweet rock and roll.

Pussy Foot The Duke is Von Harmonson's chance to show off his chops with a haunted funfair keyboard riff that repeatedly pulls the song together after Miller and Chasny have finished chasing each other's tails before it all breaks down into a rather sweet slow fade-out with splashes of piano and warped bluesy guitar.

Whiskey River glides in on Kushner's symbols and a simple guitar riff before what sounds like a guitar impersonating a car alarm goes off and the band charge into a massive, churning groove while Miller howls like Robert Plant with his old lad caught in his zip. Another alarm goes off, inspiring Miller and Chasny to battle each other into another rising frenzy before Tim Dacy bursts in on sax, immediately bringing side two of the mighty Funhouse to mind.

The brief, gentle interlude of Organs brings side one to a close and you may need a stiff drink or a quick sit down before bracing yourself for round two.

Side two crashes in even harder than side one with The Antlers Of The Midnight Sun, as Kushner's drums scrap it out with Dacy's sax before Miller joins the fray in full bezerker mode on vocals and the guitars pile in on over the top for a four-minute blast of pure adrenalin.

Brotherhood Of The Harvest howls away for the first minute before churchy organ joins echo-drenched guitar for a series of wailing climaxes that ends all too soon. Wild Whiskey finds Chasny on acoustic guitar while Miller plays long distorted notes over the top.

Blue Tomb is a suitably epic closer as slow, ominous chords are joined by a howling solo that steadily grows more distorted and out of control before running out of steam as Miller wails out some suitably psychedelic bon mots about "laying your soul down". The guitars surge up once more and Von Harmonson pulls out his raygun again before the song finally swoons into a hazy reverie.

Blue Cathedral is alive to rock's possibilities, so full of its promise, and ever restless in its desire to explore all of it that other albums tend to sound a little timid afterwards, including Comets On Fire's fourth and final LP, 2006's Avatar, which traded in a little of the craziness for a slightly more conventional approach.

Miller subsequently went on to form Howlin' Rain and the trade down from celestial bodies burning across the heavens to inclement weather when it comes to band names is sadly rather reflected in the music. Chasny, having complained about not wanting to be the "pretty melody" guy went on to make more beautiful music as Six Organs Of Admittance and another unholy racket with Sir Richard Bishop (former Sun City Girl) in Rangda.

Comets On Fire currently lie dormant - lets hope they erupt again before too long.

The Kingston Trio - The Last Month Of The Year (1960)

It perhaps says everything about the Kingston Trio's meteoric rise and fall that when I came across Last Month Of The Year in a battered cardboard box at a carboot sale I hadn't a clue what lay within and decided to hand over the required pound purely on the strength of the front cover of snow-covered benches. Having bought it in August, it then sat in my collection for 4 months before it got played.

What a pleasant surprise then to hear the sweet harmonies and eclectic song choices ranging from obscure English hymns, spirituals, folk rounds and a sprinkling of traditional Christmas songs. The Kingston Trio certainly don't deserve to be neglected as they have become but then who would have guessed that a close harmony folk outfit with roots in Hawaiian calypso music would have risen to such success in the first place?

Having released their debut album in June 1958, by November the following year the Trio had 4 albums in the US Billboard Top 10. At one stage, they were responsible for 15% of all of Capitol's record sales - at a time when Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole were also on the label - and appeared on the front of Life magazine.

Their combination of simple instrumentation, honeyed vocals and eclectic repertoire were a massive hit with the public and helped to launch the folk revival that would soon bring along the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez, though Simon & Garfunkel bore a more obviously direct influence.

But the Kingston Trio never had designs on being trailblazers. Having spent years performing at bars, restaurants and student events, the trio of Dave Guard, Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds saw themselves simply as entertainers. Having seen Pete Seeger's Weavers blacklisted for their left-wing beliefs, the Kingston Trio took a strictly non-political approach and unashamedly gave the old folk songs they sang a vocal sheen inspired by the rich harmonies of The Four Freshmen and The Modernaires.

The formula was massively popular with the public but it also stirred up huge indignation among old-school folkies, who accused them of "sallow slickness" and of being "prostitutes of the art". In a sour belch of pomposity, critic Mark Morris harrumphed about their 1959 Newport Folk Festival appearance: "What connection these frenetic tinselly showmen have with a folk festival eludes me... except that it is mainly folk songs that they choose to vulgarize."

Guard seemed the most stung by this criticism, publicly insisting that the Trio were not folk singers while privately pushing the band to get more serious about the music. He would eventually quit in 1961, with one of the reasons given being Shane and Reynolds' refusal to learn how to read music. The other two not unreasonably pointed out that having released 11 albums and played around 800 gigs in 4 years, they were already working hard enough, thanks. Not to mention the $25million in sales (approx $180m in today's money).

The first sign of Guard's keenness to appease the band's critics came with their Christmas album, The Last Month Of The Year. Reynolds later said: "Dave was responsible for a lot of that album. We really worked hard on that one, laying down a lot of the instrumental tracks before we did the vocals, working on harmonies over and over. Musically, it came off very well, it just didn't sell."

The band's sixth studio album, Last Month... was the first to miss out on reaching No.1, reaching a relatively lowly No.11 after its release in October 1960. The main reason for the public's indifference seems to have been the obscurity of many of the song choices (though the cheesy original cover can’t have helped - which perhaps explains the snowy benches on the reissue cover I’ve got).

Some of these songs are centuries old and the Kingston Trio's recording of them is now 51 years, but listening with 2011 ears what hits you is that Last Month Of The Year sounds both old and modern at the same time. Opener Bye Bye Thou Little Tiny Child would sound perfectly at home on a Fleet Foxes record. It comes from a 1534 mystery play and the only instrumentation is acoustic guitar and the twinkling sounds of what may be a bouzouki, over which the Trio's harmonies work their magic.

The White Snows Of Winter combines a melody lifted from Brahms' First Symphony with lyrics written and sung by Shane, plus Jordanaires' style backing from Guard and Reynolds, resulting in top-class crooning. A short and sweet burst of We Wish You A Merry Christmas comes with escalating banjo backing is quickly followed by All Through The Night, originally an old Welsh folk song (Ar Hyd y Nos) given English lyrics by Sir Harold Boulton in 1884.

Goodnight My Baby is a lullaby that starts with a gentle bass line from David 'Buck' Wheat, the fourth and unacknowledged member of the band at this stage, who played various instruments on the album, largely stepping in when the Trio were struggling with their own technical limitations.

Side 1 ends with Go Where I Send Thee, a spiritual previously covered by the Weavers and given a rousing hillbilly twist with banjos and an Elvis twang to the vocals.

Follow Now Oh Shepherds is a Christmas carol then popular in Puerto Rico and the lilting guitars have a subtly Spanish flavour. The globetrotting continues on Somerset Gloucestershire Wassail, an ancient folk song designed to inspire a good apple harvest for cider making and here given a Greek tweak with the bouzouki backing. Mary Mild is a variation on the old English folk song The Bitter Withy and tells the strange tale of a young Jesus wanting to play ball with the rich kids up the road and building them a "bridge of the beams of the sun" in order to persuade the snobbish brats to let him join in, which brings to mind bank bailouts, but lets not go there.

A Round About Christmas is a perky guitar and banjo-led romp through another festive child's favourite, and Sing We Noel is the other track most people have actually heard before, giving a gamboling rendition. Last Month Of The Year is an old blues tune first recorded by Vera Hall (best known nowadays for Trouble So Hard, which Moby remixed into Natural Blues) under the guidance of Alan Lomax, and the Kingston Trio throw in a little dash of rock'n'roll with their exuberant acoustic rendition.

Just 28 minutes and it's all over, which keeps you coming back for more of course. Only Shane is still alive of the originally trio nowadays at the age of 77 but the Kingston Trio name continues to this day minus his direct involvement. Perhaps he'll yet live to see this little gem finally receive the credit it deserves.