It's happened again. For the second straight 45, everyone's favourite mod-punk-indepop northern soul enthusiasts Comet Gain have released a 7" where the a-side is totally and utterly trumped by the b-side. Just as the sub-disco skronk of last year's Love Without Lies (Twee As Fuck) couldn't compete with the lesser-known loveliness of Books Of California, their latest effort Herbert Hunke Part I (Germs Of Youth) revels in lazy Velvet Underground strums and retro-hipster drawl, without even approaching the heights of its far-sweeter flip No Spotlite On Sometimes. Comet Gain have always been obsessed with the beauty of failure, but they've never looked quite so much like their failure was more by design than accident. Anyway...
I first heard of Comet Gain when they earned a place on the NME's never-ever-mentioned C96 compilation (a theoretical homage to the famed cassette of ten years previously), which i didn't quite manage to order at the time. I could never find their releases, unfortunately; the entire band had quit, save for singer David Charlie Feck, and a new line-up had been assembled before one of their 7"s finally turned up in Liverpool in 1998. That was Jack Nance Hair, which i can still vividly and excitedly remember discovering in HMV's tiny vinyl section, along with a Freeboy/Mercedes split on Stupid Cat Records which had a hand-coloured sleeve. Jack Nance Hair became an instant mix tape classic for me, and if you've ever received a compilation tape made by my own fair hand, chances are you own this song. It's perfect. Still one of my favourite record purchases of all time.
It opens with soft acoustic chords and gentle drumming, energy, beauty and restraint combining to create an instant sense of nostalgia, as Rachel Evans intones a beautiful poem about the artist's dedication to his/her work, no matter how flawed it may be. The Eraserhead star's notorious barnet (from David Lynch's absurdist feature-length debut) becomes a metaphor for the honesty and inevitable folly of Comet Gain's music, and it's all capped with Feck's gentle croon declaring, "I don't know why I do the foolish things that I do," as though the universe may unravel if he doesn't figure it out. Beautiful. And there are few more perfect lines in pop than "young, free and single - like the crack in a 45". Ah, if only they still made singles as uniquely wonderful as this. Instead, i'll have to make do with the gorgeous slices of melancholic indiepop that they whack on the other side of the vinyl.
Anyway, here's some clips of Comet Gain. One from the original soulboy line-up in 1995 (that left to form Velocette):
...and last year's drum machine-led piece of noisepop:
Wednesday 11 February 2009
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