OFF: Julian Cope w/Comets on Fire, London Royal Festival Hall, 21st January 2005 (long)

[Doug Pearson]

Great review, Jon!  (As always)

Just to add a few details/clarifications ...

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 21:28:42 +0000, Jon Jarrett
<jjarrett at CHIARK.GREENEND.ORG.UK> wrote:

>Comets on Fire" being a band whom Doug Pearson keeps
>"championing as the most exciting thing to happen in spacerock for
>years", I thought they probably ought to be seen too. "Obviously he's not
>seen Litmus but I digress.

Indeed I haven't (but the live recordings are GREAT!).  And they were
hoping to see Litmus while they were in the UK, but being on tour keeps on
a bit busy.  I'm not sure that I'd really call Comets a spacerock band per
se, but they ought to be enjoyable to anyone who likes the heavier side of
spacerock.  Sounds like they were in this case.

> The two guitarists and the Echoplex boy could not really be called
>technically adept musicians, and they were just playing maximum blitz
>freak-out stuff rather than deliberately musical soloing, though the first
>one, who also occasionally screamed incomprehensible lyrics into the mic,
>did have a sense of how to do this that he sometimes brought into play.
>The other boy (and they did seem pretty young) was just all over the place
>and spent much of the penultimate number rolling round on the floor
>fighting with his guitar as if it was trying to attack him.

"The other boy" is Ben Chasney, who records/performs solo acoustic
psychedelic folk under the name Six Organs of Admittance (his latest album
just came out on Drag City).  He's actually an extremely adept acoustic
guitarist, but there's no way you could tell that from his performances
with Comets :^).  I saw the band members for the first time since their
tour last night (Six Organs and two other members' projects were
performing), and the rest of them mentioned that they'd occasionally find
themselves unplugged from their amps after Ben danced all over their
pedals and kicked out the cords.

>        "What was actually happening, I eventually realised, was that the
>bass-player was leading. He was fabulous, with an excellent heavy
>rubberised-sounding noise and a constant flood of notes, and one of his
>amps was pointed back at the drummer who was really not playing rhythm, he
>was another lead player though a far better one than the guitarists.

Eutrillo, the drummer, never fails to amaze me.  Definitely a lead
player!  He wasn't on the band's first album, but they improved
tremendously when he joined.  He's also a fine pianist (which can be heard
on their latest album); last night he was playing songs (solo) that
sounded like "After the Gold Rush" meets (something like) Barry Manilow,
if you can believe it.

Glad to hear you enjoyed 'em ...

    -Doug
     jasret at mindspring.com