Comets On Fire

Comet Gain
From: London, United Kingdom

Comet Gain has history. They’re veritable veterans in an industry where careers rise and fall quicker than a dot.com company on a rollercoaster and they’re back to show The Vaccines, Brother and the latest crop of guitar wielding British pop urchins how it should be done.

Grown from the noisy, political and downright belligerent Riot Grrrl movement, Comet Gain harks back to a time in British music when anything seemed possible, a time when music could transform the world. But there are very few vestiges of their Riot Grrrl heritage on new album The Howl of the Lonely Crowd, an album on which they take the entire history of everything good in British pop, roll it up into a neat little ball and throw it into an off kilter melting pot. You can hear distant echoes of The Beatles, Northern Soul, the pop end of psychedelia, Dexys Midnight Runners, Orange Juice (Edwyn Collins produced the album), The Housemartins, Sarah Records, The Buzzcocks and much, much more. With antecedents as varied and as brilliant as these it’s hardly surprising that The Howl of the Lonely Crowd is a mini classic.

The backwards guitars of the album’s fifth track Yoona Baines could have learned their trade at the feet of The Beatles’ Revolver. Working Circle Explosion recalls the perfect punk pop of The Buzzcocks and the freakishly funky Herbert Hunke Part 2 sounds like The Velvet Underground if they’d spent their lives being soaked by Britain’s perpetual drizzle. I could go on listing each track and the slice of pop history it has absorbed into it’s DNA but that would deprive you of the joy of figuring it out for yourself.

The Howl of the Lonely Crowd sounds unlike anything else that has found it’s way to your ears for years. It squeezes more out of the decaying corpse of British pop than any band since Blur. This is quality British pop. Indie as it’s meant to be, true indie music, independent of fashions and trends, independent of thought, independent of deed and it leaves the lonely crowd howling for more.

This article was originally written by the Devil for The 405 and is published with permission.

8/10

Go Try

I don't have any tracks from the new album to share but here is a Comet Gain track from last year...

Comet Gain - I Never Happened by sotoughsocute

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Comet Gain - Myspace : Facebook : Last.FM

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Comet Gain
Herbert Hunke