An Emotional Devotional #2: Comet Gain hit London.
A night of RÉALISTE LOVE at The Lexington
I love Broadcast, The Velvet Underground, and Comet Gain more than anything on earth. I've accepted that I will never hear "Corporeal" or "Heroin" live, and for the longest time, I also had a worrying thought that I would miss out on witnessing Comet Gain live as well. Such is the case when you discover these bands that seemed to sparkle years before you were born or even caught onto their magic. Thankfully, come July 16th, I’ll catch something that could even rival seeing the Velvets at their peak in 1967—in my musical world anyway.
My love for the band is one of those things I have my dad to thank for. On a CD shelf filled with hundreds of CDs, I would spend hours plucking stuff down, mostly to see if it had that jangly and loose sound that I loved in bands like The Velvets and The Libertines. In this particular instance, I picked one off called RÉALISTES (it all makes sense now, doesn’t it? Funny that) by a band called Comet Gain. Even before I spun it, I was caught by the fact it had an entire extract of "The Revolutionary Modernist Manifesto" by Kiko Amat inside the insleeve. I thought, well, my Libertines CD doesn’t have anything this interesting inside, so it must be pretty cool.
After reading about Nouvelle Vague cinema and the post-modern, I spun the CD, and the obsession started from there, really. Much like with many things I really love, I struggle to find the words to express how consistently amazing it is all the way through.
"Kids at the Club" was reverberations of the London that I wanted to study in at Uni. "Moments in the Snow" was spoken word and love in ways that I had never heard before. "Don’t Fall in Love if You Want to Die in Peace" was like, wow, I have never heard somebody title a song like this before. It was “Stardust and Sawdust,” “Staring at the sky through Bob Dylan’s eye.” My love for it probably stemmed from how personal it all felt, especially with songs like “My Defiance” and “Carry on Living” being an ode to pushing forward. “Ripped Up Suit” was the kind of loose thrash that even a band like The Libertines couldn’t give.
Nobody was whacking phrases like “Smashed Heart REBEL SOUL against the rocks!” on their CDs, so that uniqueness stood out to me, I suppose.
Whatever they play at The Lexington, I’ll be happy with, because if you saw the Beatles live at any point or on a rooftop, you probably didn’t complain about what they did or didn’t play. I’d love to hear "Movies" or "Kids at the Club," though; I think that would be incredible.
This is modern magic, the réalistes vision: cockney girls meeting in Soho cafés. I can hear those burning guitars and I can feel some of us cry; dreams never end! I got really emotional at that Jessica Pratt gig I went to last month, and I figure this will happen again in a big way. It’s been a really good summer for gigs so far, hasn’t it?