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COMET GAIN - HOWL OF THE LONELY CROWD CD ALBUM BRAND NEW SEALED EXCELLENT CONDITION
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This is Comet Gain's seventh album, all told: it is fantastic, and you should buy it. Download everything else you want off mediafire, I don't care, but BUY this.
No-one else makes music like this. No-one. In a perfect world this record would be number one for a year. Except that, in a perfect world this record possibly couldn't exist. I'm thinking here of William Morris' News From Nowhere, where everyone is free, equal and therefore happy all the time (bear with me, we have torn ideals). Comet Gain write about the struggle to live and love and stay human in such an *imperfect* world, about the dirt behind the daydream, about.. well about Comet Gain World, if we're honest, a slightly romanticised North-London-nouvelle-vague landscape of beatniks, coffee shops, second-hand vinyl, failed revolutionaries and half-forgotten post-punk bands. But here's the thing: that landscape exists, just, if partly carried in our hearts, its archipelagos across the cities and suburbs of the UK and the world peopled by music fans and indie bands who live in the shadow of Comet Gain whether they've noticed yet or not.
Twenty-five years since C86 and twenty years since riot grrrl, the indie-pop aesthetic has never been more influential in alternative and underground music than it is right now. Comet Gain have kept going, through the post-Britpop years and several declarations of the end of guitar-music history, quietly releasing increasingly brilliant and rapturously-received albums fusing the anger of Huggy Bear with the romance of Edwyn Collins (Orange Juice), the wistfulness of Vic Godard (Subway Sect) and the bruised political sehnsucht of Dan Treacy (Television Personalities). If that doesn't sound like a recipe for potential mass acceptance then put aside the lyric sheet and dry your tears, jack. CRASS used to say that everything they wrote was a love song, and the same undoubtedly could've applied to Huggy Bear, but Comet Gain songs *sound* like love songs too, and with a substance and gravitas you'll struggle to find anywhere else on any scene. Go and see them live (seriously, go and see them) and you might get erratic guitars, challenging harmonies, and a wayward setlist, but they'll likely blow everyone else off stage simply because the songs *matter*, the passion is real, and the noise they kick up just might suck you in and break your heart. Well, that's what it's there for.
This album has the perfect pop of Weekend Dreams and An Arcade From the Warm Rain That Falls; the usual brace of melancholic postcards from Comet Gain World (beautiful but just short of despair); a song about the SPK that sounds like ATV; songs about a Beat writer and The Fall's first keyboard player; plus one of the best lyrics you'll hear all year: 'motherf*cker where is my bread? you'll get it off my eyes when I'm dead..'
Marilyn Monroe said in one film - I forget which - 'it's a terrible thing to be lonely, especially in the middle of a crowd', and she was right, but Comet Gain say: 'music will save you, again and again'. And they're right too.
01. Clang Of The Concrete Swans
02. The Weekend Dreams
03. An Arcade From The Warm Rain That Falls
04. She Had Daydreams
05. Working Circle Explosive!
06. Yoona Baines
07. Herbert Huncke Pt 2
08. After Midnight, After Its All Gone Wrong
09. A Memorial For Nobody I Know
10. Ballad Of Frankie Machine
11. Some Of Us Don't Want To Be Saved
12. Thee Ecstatic Library
13. In A Lonely Place
No-one else makes music like this. No-one. In a perfect world this record would be number one for a year. Except that, in a perfect world this record possibly couldn't exist. I'm thinking here of William Morris' News From Nowhere, where everyone is free, equal and therefore happy all the time (bear with me, we have torn ideals). Comet Gain write about the struggle to live and love and stay human in such an *imperfect* world, about the dirt behind the daydream, about.. well about Comet Gain World, if we're honest, a slightly romanticised North-London-nouvelle-vague landscape of beatniks, coffee shops, second-hand vinyl, failed revolutionaries and half-forgotten post-punk bands. But here's the thing: that landscape exists, just, if partly carried in our hearts, its archipelagos across the cities and suburbs of the UK and the world peopled by music fans and indie bands who live in the shadow of Comet Gain whether they've noticed yet or not.
Twenty-five years since C86 and twenty years since riot grrrl, the indie-pop aesthetic has never been more influential in alternative and underground music than it is right now. Comet Gain have kept going, through the post-Britpop years and several declarations of the end of guitar-music history, quietly releasing increasingly brilliant and rapturously-received albums fusing the anger of Huggy Bear with the romance of Edwyn Collins (Orange Juice), the wistfulness of Vic Godard (Subway Sect) and the bruised political sehnsucht of Dan Treacy (Television Personalities). If that doesn't sound like a recipe for potential mass acceptance then put aside the lyric sheet and dry your tears, jack. CRASS used to say that everything they wrote was a love song, and the same undoubtedly could've applied to Huggy Bear, but Comet Gain songs *sound* like love songs too, and with a substance and gravitas you'll struggle to find anywhere else on any scene. Go and see them live (seriously, go and see them) and you might get erratic guitars, challenging harmonies, and a wayward setlist, but they'll likely blow everyone else off stage simply because the songs *matter*, the passion is real, and the noise they kick up just might suck you in and break your heart. Well, that's what it's there for.
This album has the perfect pop of Weekend Dreams and An Arcade From the Warm Rain That Falls; the usual brace of melancholic postcards from Comet Gain World (beautiful but just short of despair); a song about the SPK that sounds like ATV; songs about a Beat writer and The Fall's first keyboard player; plus one of the best lyrics you'll hear all year: 'motherf*cker where is my bread? you'll get it off my eyes when I'm dead..'
Marilyn Monroe said in one film - I forget which - 'it's a terrible thing to be lonely, especially in the middle of a crowd', and she was right, but Comet Gain say: 'music will save you, again and again'. And they're right too.
01. Clang Of The Concrete Swans
02. The Weekend Dreams
03. An Arcade From The Warm Rain That Falls
04. She Had Daydreams
05. Working Circle Explosive!
06. Yoona Baines
07. Herbert Huncke Pt 2
08. After Midnight, After Its All Gone Wrong
09. A Memorial For Nobody I Know
10. Ballad Of Frankie Machine
11. Some Of Us Don't Want To Be Saved
12. Thee Ecstatic Library
13. In A Lonely Place
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Their Best Yet...
4 Jun 2011
Format:Audio CD
I may get arguments from lovers of Realistes, but this is arguably Comet Gain's finest offering to date. The production is much better than in past efforts which allows the songs to breathe without the whole shebang being thrown into the red. As always, David Christian's tales of life's almost winners and desperate losers are filled with an uncanny mixture of poetry and street grime. He's never a slave to his influences ( The Go- Betweens, punk, northern soul) and he creates a heady stew: raging rockers( Working Circle Explosive!, Herbert Huncke Prt2) sit comfortably next to heartbreaking ballads ( She Had Daydreams, Some Of Us Don't Want To Be Saved) A brilliant record.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A deeply human record
2 Nov 2011
Format:Audio CD
No one channels working-class idealism quite like Comet Gain, who manage to find exuberance in the small joys of record collecting, the solidarity of relationship highs and lows, and an active attitude toward combating boredom with the simplest of antidotes: human interaction. They show no signs of slowing down on "Howl Of The Lonely Crowd," a very worthy successor to "City Fallen Leaves" that ups the ante, sounding more like a second volume of their singles collection "Broken Record Prayers." Quite the contrary, this might be the most energy-infused record, front to back, that they've hatched.
Comet Gain are a bit of an indie-rock anomaly in the current milieu: earnest, non-ironic, energized toward the twin potentials of youth and art. Their music is often joyously shambolic (though they manage to turn some of their tightest tricks on "Howl," with Byrds-ian chimey guitars and tambourines ping-ponging the rhythm-keeping duties); clearly and profoundly influenced by what must be prodigious record collections cataloguing the entire history of the pop song. Some of the "Ripped Up Suit" moments of their most in-the-red album "Realistes" are present on this latest disc (the stretch of songs from "Working Circle Explosive!" to "Herbert Huncke, Pt. 2" being especially incendiary), along with some yearningly gorgeous songwriting of the quieter sort (closing number "In A Lonely Place," "Some Of Us Don't Want To Be Saved" and "A Memorial For Nobody I Know." <---I keep putting a closed parenthesis here, but it keeps disappearing when I post!
The lyrical payoff is, expectedly, replete with bared honesty, unflinching observations, gorgeously articulated nostalgia, self-referential lines that come off without self-serving artifice, and the sort of journal-entry declarations that -- sung with less heart -- might seem awkward or even naive.
Comet Gain, as a whole, is a welcome tonic to music more concerned with tricky time changes or willful obscurity. It's Motown, New Wave, classic garage rock, and punk all smashed through a distinctly British filter, emerging somehow universal. Comet Gain firmly believes that salvation is in unself-conscious music making; droning organs, furiously strummed guitars, soaring choruses -- things that might not sound out of place coming out of 1960s car radios, but for their distinct, literate modernism. This is the music that knows smoking is bad for you, but has a cigarette anyway. This is the music that reflects on intemperance two bottles in. This is the music that parses revolution through interpersonal relationships; that sees love as unconventional, that knows that to feel is to be hopelessly reckless ...but plunges in anyway.
(Note: "Yoona Baines" and "Working Circle Explosive!" seem to be have their titles swapped in the CDs index -- keep an eye on this if you are importing the CD into iTunes or another media player)
Comet Gain are a bit of an indie-rock anomaly in the current milieu: earnest, non-ironic, energized toward the twin potentials of youth and art. Their music is often joyously shambolic (though they manage to turn some of their tightest tricks on "Howl," with Byrds-ian chimey guitars and tambourines ping-ponging the rhythm-keeping duties); clearly and profoundly influenced by what must be prodigious record collections cataloguing the entire history of the pop song. Some of the "Ripped Up Suit" moments of their most in-the-red album "Realistes" are present on this latest disc (the stretch of songs from "Working Circle Explosive!" to "Herbert Huncke, Pt. 2" being especially incendiary), along with some yearningly gorgeous songwriting of the quieter sort (closing number "In A Lonely Place," "Some Of Us Don't Want To Be Saved" and "A Memorial For Nobody I Know." <---I keep putting a closed parenthesis here, but it keeps disappearing when I post!
The lyrical payoff is, expectedly, replete with bared honesty, unflinching observations, gorgeously articulated nostalgia, self-referential lines that come off without self-serving artifice, and the sort of journal-entry declarations that -- sung with less heart -- might seem awkward or even naive.
Comet Gain, as a whole, is a welcome tonic to music more concerned with tricky time changes or willful obscurity. It's Motown, New Wave, classic garage rock, and punk all smashed through a distinctly British filter, emerging somehow universal. Comet Gain firmly believes that salvation is in unself-conscious music making; droning organs, furiously strummed guitars, soaring choruses -- things that might not sound out of place coming out of 1960s car radios, but for their distinct, literate modernism. This is the music that knows smoking is bad for you, but has a cigarette anyway. This is the music that reflects on intemperance two bottles in. This is the music that parses revolution through interpersonal relationships; that sees love as unconventional, that knows that to feel is to be hopelessly reckless ...but plunges in anyway.
(Note: "Yoona Baines" and "Working Circle Explosive!" seem to be have their titles swapped in the CDs index -- keep an eye on this if you are importing the CD into iTunes or another media player)
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