Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 07/08/06
Label: Sub Pop

They could hardly have been better named. San Francisco quintet Comets On Fire are not so much a band as a force of nature, their virtuosic, acid-etched jazz-rock leaving a vapour trail of combusted synapses as it blasts across the cosmos in an arc of transcendental promise. Attenuated, trippy explorations and monstrous, sludge-rock freak-outs are generally their thing, as 2004's exemplary "Blue Cathedral" proved in its borrowing from Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, Hawkwind and Led Zeppelin, but with their fifth adventure, Ethan Miller and gang cut loose in a slightly different fashion.

"Avatar" is no less physically thrilling than their previous efforts and indeed at times (the wild, Echoplex-saturated "Holy Teeth", in particular) suggests that even the eye of a passing storm might provide a refuge from its tumult but, overall, it's less chaotic and noisily rampant, the Comets' awesome creative fury now channelled into structures more obviously resembling tunes.

"Dogwood Rust" sets out their stall, plunging into its cart-wheeling, hallucinogenic blues so abruptly you wonder if sound engineer Tim Green (F*cking Champs guitarist and controller of the Comets' two previous albums) might have accidentally shorn off its intro. Lesser bands would likely lose control of a seven minute-plus odyssey, but the discipline of these five players has them casting intricate melodic lines into the rhythmic cross-currents, then slowly, surely reeling them back in, still taut and miraculously untangled.

"Jay Bird" taps Hendrix's dizzy, atavistic blues for inspiration, but the Comets come down to earth for "Lucifer's Memory" and fabulously fluid album closer, "Hatched Upon The Age". Exercises in Cream - and Pink Floyd-flecked, bluesy piano balladry respectively, they prove the five-piece is far from a one-trick pony. Most striking of the album's seven tracks, however, is "Sour Smoke", a sonic mirage of such subtly mind-warping power it would work perfectly for the peyote ritual scenes, should any director be reckless enough to try adapting a Carlos Castaneda book for film. Marrying Can's hypnotic boogie with Television's nervy, twin-guitar interplay isn't the most obvious of party tricks, but Comets On Fire are practised magicians, their understanding of complement and contrast seemingly instinctual, expressed in clean, sharp tones - however dense the fuzz and reverb factors - and with blinding clarity.

That several band members sustain extra-curricular careers (Ethan Miller recently joined John Maloney of Sunburned Hand Of The Man to record a heads-down, blues-rock album as Howlin' Rain; Ben Chasny is also a member of fêted avant folkies Six Organs Of Admittance) is a sign of the febrile creativity that drives Comets On Fire and seems to grow exponentially. "Avatar" is perhaps thus far the most harmonically perfect of their dispatches from the frontline of west-coast Gnosticism.

    by Sharon O'Connell