COMET GAIN - Howl Of The Lonely Crowd

They're a piece of English pop history and almost nobody knows it. On the scene for just under twenty years, David Feck's Comet Gain (he's used countless aliases) have churned out albums, EPs and singles with admirable consistency (the latest, a 2008 odds-and-ends collection, "Broken Record Prayers", could make an excellent starting point for newcomers and the curious), somehow picking up the baton from masters Wedding Present and ferrying the ethics (and aesthetics - for them the two coincide) of the C86 generation into the new millennium. Always a little on the sidelines and never quite celebrated enough by critics (not even in an era of rampant retromania and nostalgia-hoarding like the one we're living through now), Comet Gain remain a perfect example of a "band loved by other bands", a name to drop and cite, always with barely concealed pride, in the list of one's own stylistic influences. So it's no surprise to find them now on the roster of London's Fortuna Pop!, a label specialising in superb indie-pop productions, whose catalogue includes the work of enlightened disciples such as Allo Darlin', Lucksmiths and, above all, Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Crystal Stilts (with whom Comet Gain have woven a dense web of shared members and stages over the years, see also the Cinema Red And Blue project).

Feck claims that in all these years of proud militancy, more than sixty musicians have passed through the band, and just as many seem to be the musical souls that a rich, varied album like "Howl Of The Lonely Crowd" (their sixth) sets back in motion in the listener's ears. It's also worth adding that the recording sessions for the album featured Alasdair McLean of fellow travellers Clientele, the legendary Edwyn Collins (whose ideal touch is felt above all in the more northern-soul moments, like "The Weekend Dreams") and devoted student Ryan Jarman of Cribs (just run a hand over the garage-punk sandpaper of "Working Circle Explosive" or "Herbert Huncke Pt. 2", a track straight out of the Modern Lovers' finest hour). The band has always poured tons of literary, musical and cinematic references into its learned songbooks (also palpable in the exquisitely Godardian artwork), in keeping with the best tradition of British indie (the Sarah, Creation, Él or Postcard kind, to be clear), but what strikes and immediately wins you over is undoubtedly their natural ability to sublimate the subtlest of references into a fabric of songs that are both precious and immediate. So we get the confession redolent of Television Personalities, "After Midnight, After It's All Gone Wrong", or the twee caress of "An Arcade From The Warm Rain That Falls", the folk vibration, somewhat Big Star-like, of "Some Of Us Don't Want To Be Saved", or the psych-pop with hypnotic Clean-style keyboards of "Youna Baines" (dedicated to the keyboardist of the same name from Fall).

"Howl Of The Lonely Crowd" thus arrives to celebrate the talent of a truly great "thinker" of contemporary pop music, positioning itself halfway between a critical study of forty years of popular culture in song form and a bittersweet elegy for the inner museum of our now-distant adolescences, already as faded as a memory.

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22/07/2011