Comets on Fire Albums (5)
What The Critics Say
Two full years after the dazzling acid-dredged, sonic song mash-up that was Blue Cathedral, Comets on Fire return, all members intact -- despite many solo projects in the intervening years -- with Avatar. There are distinct nods to the distant West Coast past on Avatar and yeah, it is a good thing For starters, the double- and even triple-tracking of Ethan Miller's voice on many of these cuts sounds like the triumvirate of Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, and Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane! The rhapsodic clamoring for ecstatic release sound in this method is beguiling, and offset by the sheer acid rock heaviness of the band's instrumental attack. Take the opener "Dogwood Rust" as an example. The cut sounds like it starts mid-jam with guitars soloing, with Ben Chasny and Miller going back and forth. The verse kicks in immediately and the sheer swirl of sound around them forces them to get over the top. The empire of psychedelic sound is formidable, so they have to. Everything from non-descriptive electronic noise, organ, thudding bass throb (Ben Flashman) and clamoring hypnotic drums (Sir Noel VonHarmonson and Utrillo Kushner) are played with force and menace. Those two guitars are the only real foil for the singers as they collide, counter, meld, and wind around one another with feedback and plenty of bite for seven-and-a-half minutes. By contrast, "Jaybird" begins calmly with the guitars twinning the blues in a riff that leads into the melody line. Sooner rather than later VonHarmonson's drums elevate the entire proceeding, ushering in splattering feedback electronics. Miller's vocals begin almost whispering, holding their own as the entire tune slowly builds into intensity. But the element of song is never lost. Chasny and Flashman hold it still for a moment or two, but the architecture is teetering and it has to flay off into many directions at once because the tune is being torn apart from the inside. Amazing. But that's how it is with Avatar: the notion of song comes first in each of these selections. All but one are given room to stretch: the only song here that isn't between six and eight minutes is the wooly, Blue Cheer-like wail of "Holy Teeth." The rest are fire breathers to be sure, but they take their time stoking the blaze. The slow, Quicksilver Messenger Service-esque melody of "Lucifer's Memory," is almost gentle as Kushner's piano and VonHarmonson's skittering backbeat carry Miller's voice -- singing Kushner's lyric -- as subsonic bass, while distorted guitars simply hold back until the cut breaks open in a gorgeous melodic swirl in the middle. The bridge section repeats over and again until, near the end of the cut, it just cracks wide open into the stratosphere without losing its sense of melody or harmony. "Sour Smoke" is a knotty, multi-storied instrumental narrative seemingly driven by one riff until the guitars start to unfold their schematic. The drum pattern keeps it all in one spot though the tune is traveling with twin arpeggios building all over the rhythm. There is a bluesy piano solo covering over a vocal chant hidden in the background; an electric piano covers over the bass and re-creates another layer of the rhythmic trance. Think Quicksilver Messenger Service's "Edward, the Mad Shirt Grinder" and you get an idea. There is jamming here, but it's scripted, with many parts written in, as the track feels more like a suite than a single song, all of it along a time pattern that changes timbres and tonalities, but never loses its focus to bridge the various harmonic segments. The set closes with Kushner's piano laying out the melodic frame for "Hatched Upon the Age." Miller begins his raspy vocal swell (which at times really does sound like John Bell of Widespread Panic) and the ever-present, overdriven guitar lines enter, sparingly at first under the organ, under the disciplined rocksteady bassline and the meandering piano. But then they cut in, sting, and retreat until they get their moment to explode near the end of the cut. Avatar is the next step from Blue Cathedral, where Comets on Fire are more involved as a band in crafting actual songs, messing around with dynamic and textural tensions, and getting the noise not so much to behave as to move in more controlled directions. It is an absolute gem of an album and an ecstatic listening experience: play very loud, please. Not only was Avatar worth the wait, but moreover, it is the mark of a band who is singular, taking from the past in order to create something new, something bold, at times accessible, and sometimes ugly, but more often than not, Avatar is stunningly beautiful, even if the definition of that word needs to expand a bit to embrace it. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Blue Cathedral, the third outing from Santa Cruz's Comets On Fire, is the culmination of five years of sonically overdriven rock & roll research. Here, the original quartet -- Ethan Miller, guitar and vocals; Noel Harmonson, echoplex and analog keyboards; Ben Flashman, bass; Utrillo Kushner, drums -- is augmented by new member and second guitarist Ben Chasny (aka Six Organs of Admittance) and the intermittent saxophone playing of guest Tim Daly (at whose studio this album was recorded). Chasny guested on the sprawling psychedelic freakout that was 2001's Field Recordings from the Sun. One of the most captivating things about this 2004 disc is how it weds the band's garagey MC5 meets Hawkwind attack with a more textural, spacious approach that includes keyboards up front much of the time -- as in organs and pianos adding some Ummagumma-Atom Heart Mother-ish Pink Floyd sounds to the cauldron. Punters shouldn't fear that the heaviness is gone, however. Far from it. One listen to "The Bee and the Cracking Egg" or "Whiskey River" should dispel those notions immediately. The Rob Tyner strangles Robert Calvert tactics that signify Miller's vocal approach are still squalling over the top of earsplitting guitar riffs -- twice as heavy as before. Harmonson's echoplex sends everything into the third dimension, and the rhythm section is so solid, so forward-driven, that it could hold its own with Cream's. "The Antlers of the Midnight Sun" is one of those powerful surging tracks that leaves the listener breathless and energized afterwards. The dueling off-the-rails guitars that push everything in the mix far into the red, the noisy adrenaline boost of that echoplex writhing over the top of the everything but the vocal, and the unwound bass and drums make this one of the great events of the new psychedelia. The percussion wound through the acoustic and electric guitars on "Wild Whiskey" is positively strange and beautifully, humidly seductive. But the closer, "Blue Tomb," walks the fine slash of a stiletto edge of tripped-out psych balladry and bone-cracking, plodding, über dope ROCK, with the added dimension of keyboards and feedback propelling it into the stratosphere. It may have taken Comets On Fire three albums to pull all the parts together -- something that was very common with acts that developed over time in the 1960s and '70s but is almost unheard of today -- but with Blue Cathedral, they've realized that there are no boundaries and no limits. This album just may signal the beginning of an exciting new era in rock music. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
'Field Recordings from the Sun'
Release Date 8/13/2002
Tracks 5
Label Ba Da Bing
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Santa Cruz semi-supergroup Comets on Fire, featuring folks from various other bands -- like the Lowdown's Noel Harmonson on "echoplex and oscillations" and Ethan Miller on guitar and vocals -- created an agreeably tripped-out second record with Field Recordings From the Sun. Though the first, hyper-limited-edition release was MC5 meets Hawkwind in the farthest reaches of the galaxy straight-up, Field Recordings tempers that somewhat with a little more restraint here and there, making for some bemusing contrasts. Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance is one of the many guests, and hearing his involving percussion work on the opening "Beneath the Ice Age" may lead an unwary listener to think this will be a fairly low-key listen. That is, until the whole band completely fires up and Miller starts singing in a massively echoed voice over equally massive guitar riffs about god knows what. Given the equally jaw-dropping roars of "Return to Heaven" and "ESP," the smack-in-the-middle mostly acoustic ramble of "The Unicorn" very much stands out, though to be sure feedback insanity begins halfway through and keeps increasing as the song continues. The general air of murk and mayhem could almost lead to assuming the album was recorded one room over, but the bandmembers clearly know what they want to achieve. Miller's attempts to be both Rob Tyner and Robert Calvert (not to mention Wayne Kramer and Dave Brock) work not as a mere revival but its own form of insanity. The Ben Flashman/Utrillo Belcher rhythm section creates more than their fair share of heavy-duty rumbling mayhem and shot-to-hell R&B breaks, while Harmonson makes as many swoops and swirls as possible in the mix. "The Black Poodle" wraps everything up with a ten-minute space rock jam and then some, with Harmonson going crazy over the rhythm insanities conjured up. ~ Ned Raggett, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Santa Cruz noisemakers Comets on Fire's debut recording is basically 32 minutes of screaming garage/psych-inspired insanity. The guitars are loud. Ethan Miller's unhinged vocals are loud. The drums are loud. The songs are short blasts of fury that sound inspired by wild bands from the '60s (Sonics, Blue Cheer), '70s (Stooges, Cramps), and beyond (Jon Spencer, the Make-Up). Helping keep Comets on Fire out of residence in cliché city is the sheer amount of power and abandon the band plays with and the presence of Neil Harmonson on echoplex. The echoplex is an old tape-driven echo and delay unit that can create some wild sonic effects. On tracks like the driving "Graverobbers" or the guitar-mad "Days of Vapors," the vocals are fed through the machine; elsewhere it just makes random weird and cool noises that add a lot of texture and depth to Comets on Fire's sound. This is a hot and exciting record; the energy never flags and the band never turns anything down much below full volume, even when the tempo is slowed on "Let's Take It All." Garage punk fans would be doing themselves a real favor by checking this disc out. This release on Alternative Tentacles is actually a re-release of the band's ultra-rare first record; as a bonus, the reissue contains 28 minutes of a noisy, energy-packed live show that shows the band to be loud, really loud. And pretty loose, too. ~ Tim Sendra, All Music Guide
