The Comsat Angels- Waiting for a Miracle; Sleep No More; Fiction; Chasing Shadows [4 Deluxe Edition Albums] (2015)

×

The Comsat Angels- Waiting for a Miracle; Sleep No More; Fiction; Chasing Shadows [4 Deluxe Edition Albums] (2015)

Close

The Comsat Angels were an English post-punk band from Sheffield, England, initially active from 1978 to 1995. Their music has been described as "abstract pop songs with sparse instrumentation, many of which were bleak and filled with some form of heartache". They have been credited as being an influence on later post-punk revival bands such as Blacklist, Bell Hollow, Editors and Interpol. The Comsat Angels toured heavily in the UK and western Europe, especially in the Netherlands; the band's two concerts in August 1982 in Iceland had a strong influence on the music scene in Reykjavík. They also toured the United States twice. Their music has been extensively reissued and recompiled since 1995 by various record labels.

×

The Comsat Angels- Waiting for a Miracle; Sleep No More; Fiction; Chasing Shadows [4 Deluxe Edition Albums] (2015)

Close

Waiting for a Miracle is a sorcerous first album, at least once it sinks in, after short-to-long phases of puzzlement, bemusement, and fascination. Its songs of romantic ruin, paranoia, and doubt are spare, inelastic, and ceaselessly on edge. Even when the songs are at their bounciest and most alluring, they have an insular and alien quality. The instruments are played with intrepid simplicity, but when they're heard as one, they sound peculiar and complex – the results aren't unlike slow, stern spins on Pere Ubu's "The Modern Dance" and "Street Waves" – albeit with insidious lyrical hooks that are innocuous to the eye and startling to the ear, like "This is total war, girl," "Sometimes I feel out of control," and "I can't relax 'cause I haven't done a thing and I can't do a thing 'cause I can't relax." Acting as something like a minimalist garage band with one foot in the past and the other in the future, with Andy Peake's memory-triggering organ bleats offset by structural abnormalities and twists, the band does come across as a little timid from time to time, unsure of how far to take its uniqueness, but it's only another factor that fosters the album's insistent nerviness. "Total War," a razor-sharp examination of a relationship snapping under the pressure of buried mutual contempt, threatens to stop as often as it appears to be on the verge of taking off, carries a circular arrangement, and provides no release. It was the album's "other" single, nearly as conventions-stripped as PiL's more venomous "Flowers of Romance" (released the following year). "Independence Day," on the other hand, gave the band its greatest commercial success, wrapping all the band's strengths in one concise package, from the brilliantly paced shifts between the sparse and the dense to the balance between the direct and the indirect. Apart from the barren, ominous kiss-off that is "Postcard," each of the remaining songs sound like singles, even if they never had a chance at putting the band on Top of the Pops. (This is a band that called itself "doomsteady" with a hint of seriousness, after all.) While there are crucial differences that reveal themselves after deep listening, this album can be appreciated by anyone touched by other maverick post-punk albums released the same year, such as Joy Division's Closer, Associates' The Affectionate Punch, Magazine's The Correct Use of Soap, the Sound's Jeopardy, and Simple Minds' Empires and Dance.

×

The Comsat Angels- Waiting for a Miracle; Sleep No More; Fiction; Chasing Shadows [4 Deluxe Edition Albums] (2015)

Close

Sleep No More, the second Comsat Angels album, is a confident follow-up that contains a tighter and more cutting version of Waiting for a Miracle's alluring insularity. Going by "Eye Dance," the torrid opener, one might expect a more aggressive affair, but that's not necessarily the case. The album turns out to be neither as pop nor as fast, with a majority of the material playing out at a dirge-like pace. There were no singles. Like Magazine's Secondhand Daylight, or the Sound's All Fall Down, Sleep No More can be a trudge and quite bleak, perhaps even impenetrable at times. However, as with Waiting for a Miracle, the dynamics of the album become increasingly perceptible with each play, and the slowest, austerest passages begin to seem as intense as the few that slam and punch. With the exception of "Restless," a mood piece of harmonic flickers, light whispers, and low throb, the album is driven by Mik Glaisher's booming drums, which were recorded in a manner – near a lift shaft, to be precise, with microphones placed on six surrounding floors – that makes the album wholly enveloping and, occasionally, imposing. (Imagine Joy Division's "I Remember Nothing" and Talking Heads' "The Overload" on top of one another, doubled in heaviness.) The subject matter: not a big surprise, given the title of the album, with further adventures in malfunctioning-relationship purgatory, along with topical matter like "Dark Parade" (about the volatile hostage situation at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran), a song that hardly repeals the level of turmoil expressed elsewhere. Regardless of the continued strength in the songwriting, it's impossible not to get caught up in the album's sounds. The title track overwhelms with its swirling layers of guitar and keyboards over an unchanging drum pattern. The storming "Goat of the West" wastes no time in whipping itself into a controlled frenzy of churning guitars, punishing drums, and bewildered vocals ("Did you see what happened?/It's so funny that I'm not laughing"). On "At Sea," the rhythm section does the riffing, with Glaisher's thumping drums suctioned to Kevin Bacon's cavernous bass. While it's not as easy to enjoy as Waiting for a Miracle – for a lot of listeners, it's that kind of album that requires some mental preparation – Sleep No More is certainly more powerful, and it's also a greater achievement. Here, the Comsat Angels became one of the era's most exceptional bands.

×

The Comsat Angels- Waiting for a Miracle; Sleep No More; Fiction; Chasing Shadows [4 Deluxe Edition Albums] (2015)

Close

Fiction's lightness in relation to Sleep No More does not come as much of a surprise. Perhaps only a song-by-song cover of Nico's Marble Index would've topped Sleep No More in terms of bleakness, so it didn't really require a conscious effort on the part of the Comsat Angels to use some brighter tones and leave a little room to breathe on their third album. In fact, Fiction begins with a song that's as much an affirmation in "After the Rain," a fragile, resilient opener that applies the band's long-established sense of economy with the kind of sprightful mallet work that could've been learned from Japan's Tin Drum. (Another aspect that indicates the band might've been listening to Tin Drum is evident in the rubbery, slithering quality in some of Kevin Bacon's basslines.) The abstract propellant bounce in "Not a Word," "Zinger," "Birdman," and the especially stripped-down "More" – which is powered almost entirely by Mik Glaisher's short-step marching beat – recalls the poppier moments of Waiting for a Miracle without retracing them. "Now I Know," "Pictures," and "What Else?!" are bracing extensions of the irreparable-relationship songs on Waiting for a Miracle and Sleep No More, using slightly different shadings and containing line after line of Stephen Fellows' quote-worthy lyrics. On "Pictures," "I was tired of explaining why you were still around" is expressed with exhausted frustration instead of malicious hostility, while on "What Else!?," he's undoubtedly bewildered: "I know you have some ambitious plans/The big bad world did not agree/You feel caught in your circumstances/Don't take it out on me." So, although there are some reprieves from the suffocating possibilities of the band's prior releases, Fiction does not amount to a significant departure. It doesn't approach the greatness of the Comsats' first two albums, but it certainly deserves to be filed alongside them. This closes out a trilogy spread across three years that either matches or exceeds similar runs by any of the band's contemporaries.

×

The Comsat Angels- Waiting for a Miracle; Sleep No More; Fiction; Chasing Shadows [4 Deluxe Edition Albums] (2015)

Close

Less concerned with attaining hits, Chasing Shadows is a return to form and an attempt to just make a good record. It's also the result of an association with Robert Palmer, a fan who executive produced the record. Despite dated production and material that doesn't match the band's first three records, the members refer to it as their fourth record. (So they essentially disown both Land and 7 Day Weekend.) That's because there's focus on the music, not allowing any room for outside concerns. Since the late-'80s production values sounded dated within a few years of release, the songs that hold up best are the ones with the most basic arrangements. "The Cutting Edge," "Carried Away," and "Pray for Rain" offer the best moments, and they're also the most quiet and most simplistic. Andy Peake plays plaintive piano for most of the record, instead of his usual synth stylings and frosty atmospherics. Other songs like the driving opener "The Thing That Counts" and "Under the Influence" are almost heavy, probably their closest to flat-out rock to date. One thing that Chasing Shadows suffers from is an almost cold, clinical feel. Even with the band's most dejected early material, there was a sense of warmth that is missing on approximately half of the record. As a benefit, it does sound much more like the Comsat Angels than 7 Day Weekend. Definitely not amongst the band's best, but a point of curiosity nonetheless.