Comets On Fire - Iconoclastic Spiritualism

Comets On Fire are a quintet from Santa Cruz, California, one of the last strongholds of the hippie movement as well as a breeding ground for the first wave of American psychedelia. That alone says a lot about the band.

The group's two founders are Ethan Miller (later on guitar and vocals) and Ben Flashman (bass), two college friends (the very same college that saw the meeting and union of Camper Van Beethoven, ed.) who decide to start a hard rock band. Their urgent need to put into practice their taste for raw vocals and ragged choruses, hard-and-pure riffs, and acid distortion at full volume leads them to contact two other guys: Noel Harmonson (keyboards and Echoplex, a device capable of producing analog echo and delay effects), and Utrillo Kushner (drums). By the end of 1999, the line-up of the combo is complete.

In 2000 the four release their self-titled debut Lp, Comets On Fire, available only on vinyl and in a limited run. The record is one of the great revelations of the American underground as a whole, and also one of the best debuts of the year. How do you combine acid-rock with filthy, baroque noise ("One Foot"), hammering blues and grotesquely mangled hard riffs ("Got a Feel In"), punk-to-rockabilly swerves worthy of an adrenaline-fuelled Cramps ("The Way Down")? Comets On Fire know exactly how it's done. With this work, the band offers a kind of deconstruction built on the abrasions of feral rage, on apocalyptic collapses rooted in the experimental brutality of a Sun Ra rather than a Jeff Beck. Acoustic sketches plagued by animalistic screams and moans, songs that furiously fuse hard-blues with the latest generation of psych-noise, bullet-paced gallops that wipe out conscious thought to become an indistinct flow of molten lava. It's a record built on immediate brevity, yet one that doesn't shy away from deep gashes and unsettling scratches inflicted on the traditional icons of the darkest hard rock temple. Exceptional drum work from Kushner. Initially released in an extremely limited vinyl edition, later reissued by Alternative Tentacles.

Their reckless, breathless rides through MC5, Hawkwind, Blue Cheer and psychedelia blend with electronic effects that are both explosive and irreverent, earning them a place among the best noise-rock records of the past.

Their success is repeated with the following Field Recordings From The Sun (on Ba Da Bing; 2002), a further leap forward in noise experimentation that comes close to rivalling the top free-form bands, fusing free-jazz, hardcore spirit and industrial inserts.

It opens with an intro built on tinkling and clattering cowbells, and closes with deafening noise bacchanals that end the record in the least reassuring way possible. In between come ferocious riffs, which almost merge with the rhythm section, free and open improvisations, possessed free-noise. If the debut carried deadly abrasions, here there's a virus injected into the deepest fibres of hardcore, and the contrast between virtuoso flourishes and shattering effects has turned into a brutal, chaotic interpenetration: the jams become more like industrial orgies, while the unleashed drums detonate ever more savage blows. There's a call-and-response piece pummelled by flashes of guitar, garage-rock afflicted with congenital mania ("Return to Heaven"), dazed tango variations for spaced-out guitars; there's Steppenwolf on the verge of collapse, dramatic contrasts between riffs, noise outlines and deformed vocals ("ESP"), terrifying guitar slashes with diabolical piano inserts ("The Black Poodle"). One of the records of the new millennium that simply cannot be ignored. As with the previous album, this work too is crowded with vibrating effects that induce supreme unease, and on top of that the band introduces variation as a tool in service of disconcerting, sinister sounds, charged with cold violence. The five tracks that make up the record are long sweeps that reveal the unconscious developments of the style, along with its charge of cathartic salvation. Ben Chasny appears on guitar for the first time.

After these two convincing studio efforts, the band devotes itself full-time to live sets. And the results are no less impressive, so much so that in 2003 Comets On Fire decide to bring in a second guitarist full-time, Ben Chasny (from Six Organs Of Admittance), who had already been a valuable contributor to Field Recordings, and to release their first live album, under the name Bong Voyage (Ba Da Bing, 2003).

A collage of live performances, though it doesn't fully showcase it (due to both the recording quality and the overly skeletal production), this record documents how Comets On Fire live are an even more impressive band than the one heard on the two studio albums. The collective free-hard-noise improvisations reach their peak here, even if not as deep and considered as on the two previous works, while the overall mood is that of a garage-band perfectly at ease with an audience and a stage. Limited to 800 copies on Ba Da Bing.

In 2004 the band moves to Subpop, and the result of this partnership is their latest long-playing record, Blue Cathedral. It's an album that pairs melodic episodes, reminiscent of a Zappa-esque little theatre, with their now-familiar space-hard rides, or with progressive or acoustic excursions more in line with a revivalism that makes it more varied and accessible, but no less ironic and sharp.

Significantly split into two long, complex tracks at the opening ("The Bee and the Cracking Egg", "Whiskey River"), interspersed with two lighter instrumental interludes ("Pussy Footin' the Duke", "Organs"), three more typical mid-length tracks ("The Antlers and the Midnight Sun", "Brotherhood of the Harvest", "Wild Whiskey"), and a long final digression ("Blue Tomb"), Blue Cathedral is a more varied album. It brings in comedy, progressive excursions, Zappa-esque parody gags, Floyd-ian and King Crimson-like swerves, and their now-usual folk inserts. The cacophonous, undefined devastation is deliberately pushed into the background, making room for a more solid, less murky sonic hierarchy that favours the vocal parts (never so Waters-like) and the distorted guitar, tangled and twisted as in the lysergic Hawkwind-style instrumental recitative that opens "Blue Tomb", or in the inlays reminiscent of their most unsettling noise on "The Antlers and the Midnight Sun". Aside from a certain underlying ideological and musical schematism, this is a spiritualism already taken for granted, one that reflects the reactionary fantasy of the early Seventies, if not indeed the gaiety and brisk humour of psychedelia.

Comets On Fire start from hard rock. Or rather, they start from all those genres that came before and after hard-rock: you could say hard-rock is brushed against without ever being fully embraced. Just look at their main influences, such as MC5, Blue Cheer, Stooges, to understand that the band's main intent is to turn its gaze back to the golden years, perhaps the most sincere and innovative of any era.

But that's not all. Alongside this "pre" impulse there's one that is entirely "post", and indeed one could say the band's charm lies precisely in this combination. The power of stoner, noise atonality and the eccentricity of so-called neo-psychedelia coexist in a swarm of frenzied guitar tangles and sound bodies that twist into horrifying distortions. This already thoroughly shapeless mass of acoustic upheavals in rapid succession is further disrupted by industrial and near-free-jazz tremors. The band's hardcore spirit is thus dematerialized and broken down by contrasting elements that, juxtaposed in an almost Dadaist manner, become an integral part of their iconoclastic program of dissolving rock's traditional "signs".

In fact, one could say that Comets On Fire's approach amounts to a kind of "iconoclastic spiritualism", that is, a will to slaughter, dissect and deconstruct rock's traditional foundations in order to overturn them and make them look like shamanic raids with the bearing of a cathartic ritual. The boundless space-rock parabolas (Hawkwind) are thus enriched with new stylistic cues ranging from psychedelia to the free-jazz of Cecil Taylor, from noise (Big Black, Chrome) to the most metaphysical industrial music. These are strong musical thrusts that, where once they barely spoke to one another, now find a decisive, almost forced, metamorphic union. It's a return to the archetypal style of the first Detroit scene (MC5, Stooges): just as back then the nascent punk sound was being shaped by the most varied influences, Comets On Fire pick up that same thread, enriching it and updating it for the post-noise generation.

The band's method is to stage — through frenzied, endless ritual dances — the mangling of apparently linear structures by way of seismic swarms, infernal sabbaths of noise ventricles, apocalyptic maelstroms of guitar explosions. All of this, rocky at first, gradually becomes metaphysical and formless; the exhausting repetition of the traditional 4/4's disintegration produces deep disorientation in the listener.

The riffs are scorching, unhinged, buried beneath avalanches of feedback, distortion and jarring sound effects, guitar vibratos that scatter rhythm line, melody, harmony and any canonical structure or development. There's no longer any synchronic accompaniment to speak of, only endless, relentless breaking points that force attention onto the dismemberment of linear structures. The result is stubborn, destructive walls of sound: but it's a cold, detached destruction, a nihilism seeking spiritual salvation by any means necessary, even the most extreme. Improvisation and the warping of the dark sides of rock's most stereotypical offshoot elements serve to bend it to sacrificial needs, to produce arcane celebrations of mysterious sonic icons that erase any semiotic orthodoxy.

It would be wrong to classify Comets on Fire's music as anachronistic or, worse, as revivalist. First of all, every component of their songs (distorted vocals, lascivious and elusive guitar, unstoppable drums steering collective earthquakes) is treated as a powerful process of abstraction that absorbs multiple creative influences. There's a kinship with the major works of Red Crayola and Royal Trux in this respect. As in those cases, it's a return to primal origins that is, at the same time, an icy negation through irreverent dissolution, and an overturning of rock's core tenets. There's also a debt to certain strands of kraut-rock (Faust above all), through the exposure of noise as artificial, fabricated layering, exposing the emptiness of the artistic artifact taken on its own, and the need to ground it in the natural data from which it inevitably springs.

Finally, their forays into industrial music correspond to a desire to mimic the convulsive movements of modernity's superstructures, and to fill them with a supreme stupor that is no longer physical but cerebral and spiritual. It's the definitive annihilation of (post)modern man, a kind of unfeeling sentence immune to change that strips away even the last vestige of humanity left in him. This is perhaps the meaning behind the folk-noise interludes for acoustic guitar and electro modulations - another of their influences, in perfect coordination with their personal "retro-nuevo" approach - with a Led Zeppelin-like flavor, as a metaphor-evocation of human feelings atrociously erased and of the discovery of a world made of depravity and wickedness.

There's nothing of the simplistic, fashion-driven garage-rock revivalism of Strokes, Libertines and Vines here: what Comets on Fire do is a genuine Faustian pact with the devil in pursuit of some semblance of redemption. Comets on Fire's music is simply "other". It's a sonic illusion born of the will toward flow, toward artifice, toward construction. The songs are in fact chaotic jungles of sound that live only through desecrating gashes, whose vantage point is, moreover, constantly shifting: now industrial drum pounding, now lightning-quick free-jazz forays, now terrifying lo-fi modulations.

Residual Echoes (Big Drum, 2004; Holy Mountain, 2005) is the project of Adam Payne, a fellow traveler of Comets On Fire since the band's earliest days. The atmospheres on the album recall the cathartic hallucinations and the long free-form devastations of Comets On Fire's second album, though in a vaguely more traditional way, and in a more archaically spacey one.

The two opening tracks are gems of sonic editing, white-hot hyper-distortion, found sound and colossal noise jams. "Slant", the first of the two, proceeds from a morass of electro pulses, gradually sinking into regions of extreme harmonic instability. "Diamond Drops" kicks off with a little concerto of detuned, dissonant acoustic guitars, but it's the sardonic feedback that takes center stage, alongside an imposing crescendo of lava flows continually overlapping one another. "A Stardt 3 And 3 And A Half" is a new para-Zappa-esque fresco, built on a mumbling guitar riff, while free-kraut spasms create a kind of acid jamming fragment, unveiling new apocalyptic scenarios.

Under the supervision of Ethan Miller and Ben Chasny, also brought back on board for the live shows, Adam Payne ("guitars, hollering, shitty bass, drum lessons, reeds, Korg MS 2000, fuzz, auto-harmonium, computer din and migraine") composed, played and recorded a murky compilation of devastations and transitions, of unexpected developments, starting out from acid and space territory and gradually enriching itself with sonic excess and fearsome cunning. Strip away the anachronism - not an easy task - and what's left is the sheer exuberance of a solid composer in the making. Album of the Month for January 2005 on "Head Heritage/Unsung", Julian Cope's webzine.

The negligible Collaboration LP (Yik Yak, 2005) is a mini-CD containing two jams improvised in the studio with Burning Star Core.

If the side projects have thus once again catered to the hardcore end of the space-rock equation established by Comets On Fire (the split with Burning Star Core, the spasms of Residual Echoes, Lowdown), from an equally significant angle one can also detect a pull toward more accessible, entertainment-oriented territory. Ben Chasny's by-now well-established avant-folk solo venture (Six Organs Of Admittance), and Ethan Miller's imminent project (Howlin Rain), are tools capable of giving organic, musical substance to the stylistic ambitions of the musicians orbiting the main band. It's no surprise, then, that the new Comets On Fire album, Avatar (Sub Pop, 2006), is a record that rules nothing out in terms of sonic ideas. "Jaybird", for instance, is the natural evolution of their past folk interludes (an intriguing bass-and-drums riff), while "The Swallow's Eye" works to rejuvenate the electronic element toward new, independent stylistic-creative paths, directly tied to the emotional swings of the full band's playing. "Sour Smoke" evokes Faces and Zombies in its solemn electric-piano chords, "Holy Teeth" is a power-garage riff worthy of the Seeds, and "Dogwood Rust" even pays homage to the modulated contortions of their contemporaries Mars Volta. There are fresh confirmations of the ironic subtlety first tasted on the earlier "Blue Cathedral", in the vaudeville theatrics of "Lucifer's Memory" and in the once-again Floyd-ian close of "Hatched Upon The Age", but the band's aesthetic now seems legible both on a global scale (stylistic completeness, skill) and on a more down-to-earth one (melodic expressiveness, sheer enjoyment), to the point where one can almost overlook the distorted nightmares of "Field Recordings".

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