By Jay Mukherjee
It doesn't happen often, but there are a few times when an album arrives that slides comfortably into your headspace like two perfectly fitting puzzle pieces. This occurred to me when I first heard the latest album by Comet Gain, the wonderful Letters to Ordinary Outsiders, their 12th album and their first new studio record since the equally brilliant, Fireraisers Forever! in 2019.
These long-time indie stalwarts consist of members Ben Phillipson (guitar), Rachel Evans (vocals), Robin Christian (percussion), Anne Laure Guillain (keyboards), Clientele bassist James Hornsey, and the singer of the band, David Christian (aka David Feck). Christian is one of those underrated, under-appreciated, and relatively unknown English singer songwriters like Martin Newell and Simon Rivers. But he also shares similarities to well known artists like Paul Weller and Ray Davies, with whom he shares a common affinity to write stories about the underdogs and outsiders in everyday life.
The single thread flowing through the album is an interview between songs where Christian answers questions posed to him. The opening track starts out with the lovely "The Ballad of the Lives We Led", where he answers the interviewer that the song is about the lives we lead "even the ones we've lived only in our head." This song reflects what I meant when I wrote earlier that this album fits perfectly with my current mood: bittersweet, wistful, melancholic, and nostalgic. Sadly, while one is supposed to "live in the moment" and "look towards the future", current events don't allow for it. When the world is on fire, one tends to want to escape into the past.
Along the same vein is "Do You Remember 'The Lites on the Water'" ("Do You Remember/When We were Younger/When We were Stronger/Not like now") and "Danbury Road", where the interviewer introduces the song by saying, "We all disappear and reappear somewhere else, but the house remains." Feck sings about a friend who still lives in that same house he grew up in and thinks back to the times they would all "come around, look at Marvel Comics and listen to Fab Four songs." These are bygone eras, but wouldn't it be cool right now to go back to those simpler days (even if they were only just simpler times in our heads)? "If They Can't Find the Way Then There's No Way Out" with its trumpets and organs sums up that feeling of nostalgia perfectly. "Everyone is looking for something, and everyone needs help to find them," Christian sings. Indeed.
Not all songs are melancholic and nostalgic. There is the single "Beat of the Veins", a raucous song with a sing-along chorus and the excellent "Threads", a mashup of Belle and Sebastian and The Fall, with lyrics that reminded me of The Kinks' "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" from the Sixties. Despite lyrics like "When you get to the bottom/you can't get back" from "Yeah, I Know It's a Wonderful Life, but There's Always Further You Can Fall", the album evokes hope and strength. Even as things are spiraling downwards all around us, somehow we are all going to be ok in the end. Hopefully.
Letters to Ordinary Outsiders by Comet Gain is out now via Tapete. Details below too.
[Photo: Dani Canto]