Comus – First Utterance

Esoteric

Comus‘s First Utterance is one of those albums that lights your head with its brilliance. Even before you hear any music, the ball-point intensity of Roger Wootton‘s artwork rips into you, its monochromed grimace filling the canvas like some ancient peat man, a crook-backed-crippledom siphoning a sinister certitude that’s so hard to resist.

For the uninitiated and seasoned traveller alike, this is a wildly exaggerated dark age of feral eyes and equally murderous appetites, an album that excites and terrifies in equal amounts. Those falsetto throats of “Diana” set the scene, insanity inching as a virgin’s virtue hangs in the balance, chased lustfully through a steaming woodland. Bobbie Watson‘s vocals silhouetting Wootton’s lush lunacy (goblin cackle and all), cut up on a percussive runaway that convincingly mines a tangle of legs in hot pursuit. It’s an inspired start, and “The Herald” interjects a flourish of spidery sweetness as Watson’s oval operatics clamber over you with silken promise and the acoustics send delicate paper cuts round your heart. A masterful flamenco-like flame tying you up in scented garlands and fluted butterflies.

A reprieve that the amazing musicality of “Drip Drip” burgles in a brambled halo of sacrificial slaughter, all spittle-spanked and sprawling. The songwriting, gleaming with a lived-in authenticity that indulgently loses itself, leap-foots around before interloping on some yodelled hallucinogen-fuelled jam (an unhinged spectacle so typical of this album’s DNA). The protagonist returns from the festivities to cut her body down for a last communion: “I’ll be gentle, I’ll be gentle”, he promises in a wild psychosis that carnals a cadaver chill, beams with bright (and fleshy) abandon. Your imagination manically gripped to the drama, left to reel in burrowing underlines of instrumentation.

It’s a very physical beast that grips violently, musically thrusts the suggested further. Glenn Goring‘s glinting flints are sharp and serrated, Colin Pearson‘s viola never far from exploding in a contraction of lacerating licks, all snaked over by Jon Seagroatt‘s flute as that percussive push blooms your head like those Vietnamese forests on the History Channel. It’s a powerful and unsettling affair that even by today’s liberated standards mauls the malevolent, psychotically paints desire with a predatory lunge. “Song To Comus” galloping your head in incessant strum, a rush of endorphic acoustics that anarchically piranha, procure the ravenous appetite of Wootton’s marauding libretto (or should that be libido).

First Utterance certainly makes the folk-prog of the day look like twee, bargain-bin twaddle by comparison. A startling universe that (unsurprisingly) piqued Current 93‘s interest as far back as 1988. Their Earth Covers Earth album was dedicated as the “Second Utterance for Comus”, an inspired insurrection that the insistent rub of “Hourglass” addictively bit into and included (and more directly) a stunning cover of “Diana”. Really got to thank David Tibet for my introduction to the world of Comus, and these were pre-internet days after all, when you had to really work hard to find the riches, often in the hissy guise of (fourth generation) cassette swaps. Finding a buggered copy at a car boot sale was a joyous day, I can tell you, its poor condition (like my first Faust album) only enhancing the experience.

It’s a great ride that the ’70s wasn’t really ready for, one that viscerally shakes with vitality. The galloping dizziness of “The Bite” grabbing you like a zombie, hungry for your brain. Bobbie’s “Ahhhs” caging a condemned Christian’s last hours, its agitated after-shadow “Bitten” illustrious with ectoplasmic wonder. The lunatic asylum of “Prisoner” that follows, seemingly caught in the heat of electro-shock therapy — an original album ending to which the Esoteric label (responsible for re-releasing this gem) have added a few cherished extras. Rarities from their seven-inch accompaniment that needle a much needed feminine swerve of acid folk stylings, tunes that psychedelically slip the melodic in a quieter, contemplative vein. Vibes that the last track (lost to the initial release) “All The Colours Of Darkness” furnishes a fitting finale to.

A remarkable conception that rides roughshod over the horizon, feasts unashamedly on its heart of darkness — First Utterance is a pleasure to be reacquainted with.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-