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
Comus
London 21 September 2013 It is a mild, early autumn Saturday night and Upper Street is the very picture of modern urban revelry. Outside the doorways of fashionable bars and clubs, the pavements are clotted with thick knots of drinkers and smokers, the ‘dun-tsch, dun-tsch, dun-tsch’ beat of anonymous dance […]
Rise Above (12″)/Coptic Cat (CD) It was 1974 when Comus, after two truly blood-curdling albums (1971’s First Utterance and 1974’s To Keep From Crying), retreated to his woodland bower, lay down in a mossy hollow and went to sleep. Those recordings had been barely understood at the time, their power […]
The Borderline, London 29 April 2012 It had been raining solid for 24 hours. The streets of London were filled with a babbling brook of water that the sodden masses had to navigate to stop them from getting drenched further and all the while more fell from the sky to […]
Gnostic Dirt Even in this age of Tunng, Espers and countless assorted other groovy out-there New Folk outfits who are busy fusing ancient melodies and instrumentation with samples, beats and all the trappings of hip urban coolness as fast as their little hands can programme, for most people the word […]