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.
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