Comets On Fire- Corner Hotel
» Comets on Fire - Corner Hotel, The, Vic - March 9, 2007
» Grouplove - January 4, 2012
» The Dum Dum Girls - January 3, 2012
If you could imagine what it would be like to see a live exorcism that comes pretty close to what the Comets On Fire gig was like.
From the get go these guys just flew into the music head first. It was hard to decipher the songs at first but once you stuck your head into the waves of noise I recognized a few songs of the Avatar album, but if you were to go to the gig and expect to hear the songs exactly how they are played on the album you would be sorely disappointed, I’ve read in articles that no two Comets On Fire gigs are the same.
They scream and wail but it’s the intoxicating blend of feedback and massive guitar solos that entice you pay attention. Ethan Miller is one hell of a vocalist he very reminiscent of Captain Beefheart in his hey day.
One thing that surprised me was the lack of action in the crowd for a band with such magnitude the audience were pretty lame, no dancing pretty much stagnant, there were even a couple of girls up the back sitting down, why were you even there!
As opposed to when I saw Comets a couple of days later at Golden Plains Festival, they crowd appreciated them a lot more.
Comets on Fire have been around 8 years but it’s only been in the last couple when people have started to stand up and pay attention, they have made whole slew of fan’s including the high priest of weirdness Julian Cope.
Not many bands these days have an element of total freeness to their music, Comets On Fire prove how you can be concise in your tunes but also have that sense of being on the edge, at one point you think they music might fall apart then all of sudden in gets reeled in.
Most of the guys in the band seem relatively young, but they wear their influences strongly, there’s a great mix of MC5 power with a mix of the freak out power of Captain Beefheart.
They opened the set with 'Dogwood Rust?' As I said before the songs melded into one though out the night, if you were to take a tab of acid that night you probably would have thought you would have been caught in the eye of a hurricane.
An amazing gig of sludge psych rock that would clobber a disbeliever that rock doesn’t have any power any more.
