Comus - First Utterance

Third in an occasional series of why those albums are in the sidebar.

It's 1989, East Coker, Somerset. After midnight there are only so many choices available. You can try to get a taxi into Yeovil where, unless it was one of the Indie nights, te clubs were full of regulation pleated chinos and old school (no, not old skool, nowhere near as cool as that) shoes and more than likely you’d end up drinking too much Toby bitter and snogging someone’s ugly second-cousin (perhaps even your own on a bad night)...

Or alternatively you could stuff some liberty caps, rub beef fat on your chest and run around the woods pretending to be wolves.

This is the music you hear as the wolf pack starts howling.



The Comus album First Utterance is a black light at the heart of British Folk music. Turning it's back on the amber glow of most prog-rock, it spins instead in altogether darker holes, taking nature at face value and succumbing to the rule of the claw. For Comus, the woods are full of Silent Hill dwarves, skipping and stabbing and sending steaming coils of blood and guts and dirty magic into the air.

The violins scrape at your insides, the shakers sound like rattling teeth and drums like a dozen trepanned skulls. They play thrash metal and drone-rock on acoustic guitars, strumming until their fingers bleed while Roger Wooton's possessed vocals rise further and further into some primal lycanthropic ecstasy. The la la las sound like the dying breaths of the sick and the insane, clambering in human pyramids to get back into the sun.

You know this guys eyebrows meet in the middle

There is music in here that is undeniably beautiful but it's all suffused with dirt and suffering and deep Cthonic evil. You can hear the Wicker Men flaring, the Gods walking around with huge spent cocks, the maenads tearing each other to pieces in Dionysic frenzy.

The whole album can be downloaded

here

But I don't suppose it'll be around for long.