Review by Jay Mukherjee
For the past few weeks, the esteemed owner of this site, Glenn Griffith, has asked me if I were interested in reviewing albums here at A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed. To my delight, he asked me to review the latest album by Comet Gain called Fireraisers Forever!, out on Friday on Tapete Records (home of label-mates Robert Forster and Amelia Fletcher’s The Catenary Wires, two acts reviewed here). Having been a fan of this band for over 25 years, I jumped at the chance to review this new record, the band's first since 2014's Paperback Ghosts.
I first heard Comet Gain's combination of indie jangle and C86-influenced pop when I was a graduate student at the University of Maryland in the mid-90s. I was one of the few lucky people who worked within 50 yards of WMUC, our college radio station and its terrible signal (for those under 40, "radios" were these devices with knobs and antennas that would pick up radio waves, i.e. signals). One day a delightful song came on the radio, so delightful in fact, that I waited another 20 minutes to find out who it was. It was none other than Comet Gain! I hightailed it to the local used record store and promptly bought their first album, Casino Classics. Furthermore, the album was on Wiiija Records, the home of the great Anglo-Indian band Cornershop, which gave Comet Gain additional credibility with me.
Over the years, the band consisted of a myriad of revolving members, but the one constant has been lead singer, David Feck. Feck is the quintessential sort of English songwriter who flies under-the-radar like Simon Rivers (The Bitter Springs) and Martin Newell (The Cleaners of Venus), other songwriters who are criminally overlooked but who continue to make great music. On a macro level, the band finds itself where most of us in America and England are, which is to say, angry and hopeless at the current political/societal conditions in both countries. On a micro level, the band also finds itself and the members, like many of us of a certain age, feeling nostalgic and coming to terms with getting older.
Fireraisers Forever! starts off with the ferocious stomping beat of "We Are All Fucking Morons", 2 minutes and 44 seconds of blistering anger directed at our elder generation ("Boomers", there I said it) and Brexit. "I just want to understand you / before I go to war with you / like why you get so scared of the fragile, weak and weird", the song goes. "We are all fucking morons," singer Rachel Evans (who shares singing duties on this album with David Feck) continues. "And we’re a nation in reverse." The cut ends with, "To all the Thatcher children / you can't take your gold with you!" Fantastic! Many of us can empathize with those feelings!
Musically, the album ranges from Brian Jonestown Massacre-ish garage rock ("The Institute Debased" and "Werewolf Jacket"), to countrified slide guitar songs a la Velvet Crush (the beautiful "The Godfrey Brothers" and "Her 33rd Perfect Goodbye"), to songs with world music touches ("Bad Night At the Mustache" with its Indian Tabla drums), and even an ode to the great socialist Chilean folk singer Victor Jara ("Jara, Finally Found!"). (Please see the Netflix documentary ReMastered: Massacre at the Stadium. It's a must watch!).
However, the best song on Fireraisers Forever! is the single "Mid 8Ts", which is permeated with a feeling of nostalgia, of missing those carefree days of a bygone era. David sings, "We were 60's in the 80's / jumpers with holes, playing our roles." The song then transitions to a C86-style chorus of David and Rachel singing, "And you, you belong here, and you might as well go where you belong", and now we find ourselves "old mods with bellies and hair like shit / all your heydays deserve better than this." But the characters singing this also realize that they can never go back: "My punk rock damage is done / I'm here and it's where I belong." Who over 50 can't relate to this? It's a great single.
Overall, the album fits nicely in the arsenal of Comet Gain's great discography, though I welcomed the fact that this album is angrier than the others. If you haven't sought Comet Gain out before, please do. You won't be disappointed with Fireraisers Forever!.
Fireraisers Forever! is out on Friday via Tapete Records.
More details on Comet Gain via the band's official Facebook page.
[Photos: Phil Bower]