Cobbled together in 1992 and sustained in shifting incarnations since, Comet Gain have always evinced a confident timelessness. David Charlie Christian Feck presses on, and for Broken Record Prayers he’s united, with no immediate warrant, sundry singles recorded between 1997 and 2007. The outcome is a 70-minute behemoth, a sprawling, desultory, but variously touching apparatus of melancholy and empowerment that, on the level of thematics, enshrines an indie-pop umbrella logic — daydreams, desperation, defeat — and articulates it in a wide range of idioms.
In other words, Comet Gain trades in universals and mounts a compelling archaeological case for pop’s debt to (or at least kinship with) an entire lineage of lovers’ rock departing from Northern soul and the numinous American garage. Variety abounds. Surprises don’t, but that’s fine; the flourishes of omnivory are more subdued this time than in the crew’s mid-period output — such as Réalistes, which can easily secrete the odor of affectation — and Feck occasionally strikes gold. His programmatic nostalgia is spread thick, to be sure; the liner notes read, “We believe in obsolete things and passionate hearts and still do and made these records from our hearts to yours for whatever it was and still is and could be.” More to the point, though, is the extent to which Broken Record Prayers, for all its aggressive sincerity, seizes on the collective aspect of cultural production, cataloging those commonalities and shared repertoires on which the scene effect fundamentally rests. More than ever, Comet Gain addresses interpersonal, transactional experience in a decidedly unstylized way.
Feck’s and Rachel Evans’ vocals deftly oscillate between abjection and triumph, two faces of the same cosmopolitanizing, impersonal British milieu. The spectral despair of “If I Had a Soul” stings, but the Gain gang saves face imagining “Love Without Lies,” one of six previously unheard tracks included here. “Jack Nance Hair” mourns the 1996 suicide of Heavenly’s Mat Fletcher, their drummer and Amelia’s little brother, while the spiky “Orwell Liberty Dance” spins a more ambiguous yarn over Kay Ishikawa’s heroically meaty bassline. There’s sadness aplenty, but it’s quickly transmuted into a point of pride, spouted all conviction-like atop crashing beats, jangling strings, and shape-shifting organ bits that portend sheepish spells of goosebumps. And anyhow, everybody hurts; between the defeatist Deena Barnes cover “If You Ever Walk Out of My Life” (“There’ll be sorrow and heartbreak/ Teardrops and heartache”) and their own “Look at You Now (You’re Crying),” no one loses because no one wins.
Problems arise in times of self-indulgence, and Feck hasn’t shed his predilection for a sort of orchestral maximalism. Too many songs run five, six, even seven minutes long; indistinct codas cap the big beasts; and the quieter songs can seem directionless. When he submits to squalls of proper nouns, or when his influences crystallize like an awed but still exoticizing literature review, no good can come.
Broken Record Prayers doesn’t suggest obsolescence. Its juxtapositions and scope, rather, illustrate the ease with which nostalgia, for all its tactical purchase, can in fact be overcome. Covering Curtis Mayfield alongside The Clean, waxing reflective and accusatory in the same heave, Comet Gain do appear vulnerable, but their evident strut offsets the echoes of inadequacy, and they have some fun dramatizing this give-and-take. Comet Gain will always be of the ’90s — call it C96 if you absolutely must — but their enduring worth, so fruitfully displayed on at least half of this compilation, outruns the strictures of time or place. In a synoptic but very permanent way, this record is every punk’s sentimental education.
1. Jack Nance Hair
2. You Can Hide Your Love Forever
3. Young Lions
4. If I Had a Soul
5. Brothers Off the Block
6. Beautiful Despair
7. Love Without Lies
8. Hard Times
9. If You Ever Walk Out of My Life
10. Books of California
11. Look at You Now (You’re Crying)
12. Mainlining Mystery
13. Asleep on the Snow
14. Beatnik
15. He Walked by Nite
16. Orwell Liberty Dance
17. Emotion Pictures
18. Tighten Up!
19. Germ of Youth Part II
20. Record Prayer