A Long Orbit.
There’s a moment during The Afterlife where the whole thing sounds like Kraftwerk and Can have conspired to kidnap Tangerine Dream then lock themselves in a European particle accelerator propelled by Red Bull and amphetamines.
I know this because I’ve recently been playing YouTube recordings of 1977 editions of the Alan Freeman Saturday Rock Show and the vibe is remarkably similar to the Pernod and Black or Motorik and Synth of those West German Krautrock influencers and any number of Seventies Prog Rockers.
The kosmische jazz rock soundz summoned by The Comet Is Coming are not so much tunes as weather systems. Saxophones spiral like sirens stretched by singularity while the rhythm section hammers away with the pitiless pulse of Seventies Neu! There’s plenty of Soft Machine lurking too especially when the valve sounding synths start bubbling like a chemistry set too close to a Bunsen burner. But where the old Canterbury lot occasionally disappeared up their own intellectual exhaust pipes, this lot remember the crucial detail – that repetition is meant to induce delirium, not exam success.
The electronics drift and pulse with a cosmic glow, but what saves the whole enterprise from prog-rock self-abuse is sheer brute force. The grooves don’t noodle, they pummel. This is dance music for people who think nightclubs should be held inside abandoned observatories just off the M25 at midnight and before any thought of ‘chilling out’.
When the album ended my Spotify ‘Radio’ continued da beat – and it could have been the same band, GoGo Penguin, Ishmael Ensemble, Sons Of Kemet all sounded remarkably similar. Finally, Avishai Cohen & Big Vicious made it start to sound more like Massive Attack because it was Massive Attack, a cover of Teardrop which reminds us that these Comets are in a long orbit, returning to earth every few decades, the same, but different.
The Comet Is Coming – The Aftermath (2019) EP or mini album of 32 mins 21 seconds
Favourite Track: The Seven Planetary Heavens
Although Summon The Fire on another album is the best TCIC track I heard.