(53) A mediocre review of The Comsat Angels - Sleep No More.
"Tap tap tap boom boom boom tap boom BWOWROWROW!" goes the intro to "Eye Dance", with a startling rapping of Mik Glaisher's drums (performed on an elevator landing with microphones catching the sound at six different levels in the lift) to jolt you awake, and if that weren't enough then Stephen Fellows will flail away at his whammy bar. Sleep no more, indeed. Kevin Bacon -- no, not the actor -- shall accompany him a succession of ominous rumbling bass notes as Andy Peake supplies the most elegantly glacial and tasteful keyboard sounds that ever appeared on an Eighties record. The sound (not The Sound, who toured with them later in 1981 -- oh, how I would've loved to seen that tour) of this record is strikingly nocturnal, with the brighter spots -- such as this particular song -- sounding like the auditory equivalent of orange freeway lights at night while on a freeway approaching a city center, much like the cover of their debut album, 1980's Waiting for a Miracle. Stephen Fellows himself has blossomed as a vocalist from sounding a bit like Elvis Costello on the aforementioned record to a dejected predecessor of Catherine Wheel's Rob Dickinson (a fan of the Comsats, incidentally) on this release. In "Eye Dance", Fellows interrogates a romantic interest about whether they made a "strange connection" or if it was simply his imagination, as the change in his partner's expression in the second verse implies. Like the remainder of the lyrical content on this album, it's deadly simple and yet poignant and highly effective. Peake's keyboards swell softly in more inquisitive and pensive moments and then become bolder when Fellows seems unnerved, Fellows' guitar careens around as if in (or mirroring the) distress, and at just the right moment the drums soften up (when the change of expression is noticed) before everything becomes gloriously wracked in the outro.
"Sleep No More" commences with another steady but hesitant drum pattern that neither changes nor relents (not that it sounds imposing) and the most glacial set of keys on the record, swelling and ebbing gorgeously in an ambient fashion without forming something coherent but adding just enough discomfort to the proceedings as Fellows describes watching a city's glow and then briefly reflects upon escaping to somewhere else. Massive bass notes and some FX provide even more of a sense of unease before the song disappears. "Be Brave" rumbles in with quick but stammery tom-toms and two unsettling bass notes, Fellows' guitar ignites off and on throughout, and Peake's keyboards heighten the tensions. Fellows bleakly recites a very simple lyric, initially noting a whisper "at the back of everything" and later adding that it sounds "like a constant threat." In the chorus, Fellows (who, as All Music Guide reviewer Andy Kellman wrote in an older review of this album, sounds as if he's singing with hunched-up shoulders) declares that when the whisper calls again, "we won't hear; we will shout and we'll drown it out" -- presumably referencing resistance to the Thatcherite regime and its supporters when one listens further into the album and realizes how political parts of it are ("Dark Parade" references a helicopter crash in Iran around the time of the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, "Goat of the West" is almost certainly a stab at Ronald Reagan). However, Fellows dejectedly notes that instead of acting out against such forces, they instead "sit around and make a joke about the way things are and how it won't get anything." Hmm, that observation seems even more relevant today.
The dark heart of the album really begins to show on "Gone", which Martin Gore of Depeche Mode covered on his Counterfeit EP. Another study of a dissolving relationship (or better yet, an examination of a disappearing partner) ensues, but as usual Fellows makes it virtually poignant. Yes, the three keywords to this album are dejected, nocturnal, and poignant. Glaisher's drums sound particularly menacing here, with sharp snaps and rolling shuffles of toms. Peake's keyboard work sounds almost like an organ again (as was the case with most songs on their debut EP and album), Fellows' guitar becomes frayed and fraught by the end, and Bacon's bass rumbles and gently propels the song. "Dark Parade" might be the bleakest moment on the record, an impossibly hopeless trudge rhythmically (in a good and compelling way) with assorted FX, lone synth notes, and sparingly used but startlingly wracked guitar work for the first few minutes before turning into something steadier and driving in the last minute or so, with Fellows intoning variants of the title in a ghostly manner due to the amount of reverb on his voice. (And you thought Joy Division was dark! The Comsats aren't as theatrical, but they can definitely be dramatic, as is the case here. The only other album I can think of that shares such a nocturnal sensibility with a tastefully dramatic sweep would be Breathless' The Glass Bead Game -- incidentally my other favorite album aside from this. That must provide some interesting insight into my nature, certainly.)
"Diagram" could have slotted into Waiting for a Miracle with the off-kilter pop sensibility in its composition (the rhythm section sounds halfway dubwise and yet seems like "Total War" revisited without the stops and starts), but the production and Fellows' voice make it a perfect fit for this record. Lyrically, it seems to be about self-loathing from a third-person perspective. "Restless" might be the most unique moment on the record. The lyric hints at more vague relationship quandaries, so that's nothing new, but it's almost as colourful as the title track of this album in completely different matter, with one note keyboard swells and guitar sketches that evoke a sunrise or sunset in the American West -- a very atmospheric and dark country sensibility. It's much slower than the other songs on this record, is almost entirely devoid of percussion until the end (save for the synthesized bass drum pulse that keeps the time throughout), and becomes quite foreboding at the end before seeing a brief release at the close that revisits the start of the song. "Goat of the West" is a bitter but (s)punkier affair, with clattering (but not complex) drums and circling, zippy guitar riffage augmented with more organ-like keyboard work and a gentle sounding but propulsive bass rumble. "Light Years" is nowhere near as fast as its title would imply; it would serve a better cousin to "Restless" considering how slow it moves -- quick enough to seem distressed and propulsive but slow enough to seem like a moody trudge, and indeed it sounds like all those descriptions. It's more restless than "Restless" as well, and very lyrically vague in regard to its circumstances -- another hopeless lament with a final, seemingly optimistic but very absurd demand to "take our friends, raise them up, (and) keep them safe for us" as if they were orphaned infants. The only explanation I can come up with for the lyrical content might be something about a potential lack of contact with the outside world in the face of wartime (considering how "hours pass, distance grows", the lamenting of a place that "seems so far from here" and "what might have been", and the narrator's wondering about someone) but I'm surely looking too deeply (and very pitifully) into it. The album closer, "Our Secret", is so good that the band revisited it twice more (once on the single for "The Cutting Edge" and again during a Dutch radio session in 1994 -- not to forget the BBC version from this period) and Silkworm couldn't even fuck it up. Musically, it sounds quite ambivalent in mood (if you're feeling positive) or downright dejected and verging on doomy, with a rolling bassline, nervy guitar work, and more organ-like keyboard work -- but it's certainly the most optimistic lyric on the album and the final glimpse of the colloquial light at the end of the tunnel, with "every boy, every girl around the world" living in hope, "one world at one time" and some secret ingrained in "the blood ... in the atmosphere" with a gently but almost confidently defiant chorus of "We will never, we will never, we will never give it up!" that grows stronger each time it's repeated. And I fucking believe it.
A superior review of it located here.
"Eye Dance"
"Gone"
"Restless"