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Single/Download Review
The Comet Gain Fingerprint Ritual EP Fortuna Pop! Records
Article written by
Ged M - Mar 22, 2015
Now with the definitive article in their name (did we ever doubt there could only be one Comet Gain?) the new EP has everything you every dreamed of from the band, in the space of one EP. And a lot of space is needed; it kicks off with the 11 minute-plus ‘Breaking Open the Head Part 2 (The Eye Shaped Room)’, less a tune and more magikal rite and ritual, incarnating the spirit of psychedelia by summoning decadent authors and doomed musicians rather than demons. With its pulsing, mutating sound and backwards guitars, it invites you, according to the sleevenotes, “to become the godhead of your own pop art universe from the comfort of your living room”. Yet for all the spirit of exploration there’s a sense of waste and decay, and a mantra that seems to condemn the solipsistic wanderings of the so-called Summer of Love: “do we have to do this all over again? Didn’t we do it right the first time?”
The other three tracks are classic Comet Gain. ‘That Lucifer Summer’ jumps and lurches with organ-fired garage rock energy, a dementor on guitar, the story of the Aquarian Age gone bad. ‘To The City’s Core’ is like 70s soul, informed by persistent sorrow but with a fierce, rebellious energy, and ‘The Obsolete Significant Dignified’ is one of David’s elegiac tunes, full of frustration, defiance and angry guitars and a message that takes you back to the psychonautical message of the first track on the EP “God’s nothing without you…you can be heaven by yourself”. That utopian spirit born of outsider art carries this EP, the Gain raging at the dying of the rebellious light in magnificent fashion.