| Is this psych-rock or something? I guess, maybe, I mean why not – it’s just that when I think of the term “psychedelia,” I imagine a thing that sounds anchored painfully to a never-extant era, willfully retro and totally boring. Which description is the exact opposite of what you hear when Comets on Fire really get their grubby mitts around the living-religion-for-all-the-wasted-children sound they’re pursuing. They’ve got all the basic elements of psychedelic rock – the beyond-heavy distortion, the pedals, the rumbling drums, the freaked-out vocals. In that sense there’s no denying exactly where you’d file this record. But they have a quality that you seldom hear outside of Brother J.T. records in the psych field: total immersion. If you heard a snippet, you’d think you’ve got the record pegged, but give yourself the first seven minutes of the nine-minute monster that opens the album and you’ll know that what you’re in for is a navel-deep stroll through the swamp: the bass is resonating all the time, and the drummer keeps repeating variations on one rolling figure as if the right combination would somehow result in time off for good behavior. There’s just so much noise – but it’s noise inside of a groove, quite different from what we think of when we talk about “noise music.” It constructs its own parameters for the hoary psalmist’s “Sing a joyful song to the Lord” and then rubs it in everybody’s faces. That the song ends as it began, with bells & bones & rattles at people chanting like mongrel druids: ah, it gives me the shivers. |