Album of the day: Comus – East of Sweden

Praise for Comus‘ East of Sweden from San Francisco’s aQuarius Records: “Live reunion album” aren’t three words (in sequence) that we normally get too excited about. But when the band is the legendary British pagan acid folk rock act Comus, who are responsible for having made one of our very favorite albums of ALL TIME (their 1971 debut on Dawn, First Utterance), one that Andee here in fact ranks as his absolute favorite record ever, well, that’s another story.

With their cult following growing and growing over the years (with big fans like Opeth and Current 93 helping to keep their name out there), Comus finally reunited to play the Melloboat Festival in Sweden in 2008, and at the time we seriously considered buying plane tickets to fly over and attend. They’ve done some more gigging since, and Allan was in fact lucky enough to get to see ‘em at last year’s Roadburn festival.

He can attest to them being pretty darn incredible, it’s hard to imagine that their younger selves could have done much better of a job, though they might have looked the part of pixies and freaks a bit more – not everyone in the band still has long hair these days, though some of ‘em do, and actually their female singer Bobbie Watson looked like she practically hadn’t aged at all, still a bewitching blonde beauty, with a lovely lovely voice…  and they really, really were enjoying themselves. As they obviously were at this historic Melloboat gig as well, and sounding fantastic especially considering it was the first time they’d played together in 34 years!!!

We’ve heard a bit of this recording already, the song ‘Diana’ from their Melloboat performance appeared on a limited edition split 7″ we listed a while back, and we noted that it sounded perhaps “even more woozy and carnivalesque and maniacal than they did back in the day”. They definitely nailed it, maybe it’s some pagan magic, ’cause remember, Comus is the ancient god of revelry, and he wasn’t gonna let anybody on that boat down.

While it’s not the same as having actually been there, of course, we figure some diehard Comus fans are gonna be curious to hear this. Especially since it includes, in addition to renditions of five of the seven songs from their debut, a cover of ‘Venus In Furs’ by the Velvet Underground! A song we guess they also did back the ’70s, the VU being an influence on them that we wouldn’t have considered, but it totally fits, creepy and catchy, with sawing violin, sounding like something that they could have written themselves for inclusion on First Utterance.

The full tracklist: ‘Song To Comus’, ‘Diana’, ‘The Herald’, ‘Drip Drip’, ‘The Prisoner’, ‘Venus In Furs’, ‘Song To Comus (encore)’. That’s right, they did ‘Song To Comus’ twice, but omitted two other songs from First Utterance, ‘The Bite’ and ‘Bitten’, oh well. At least they didn’t do a bunch of stuff from their not-so-critically-acclaimed second album… You can decide for yourself if you want to hear this, or just stick with the mystical original, some folks (including some of us) may prefer to leave live Comus to the incomparable realm of our own imaginations, where they have long dwelt…

Released on a new imprint co-run by C93′s David Tibet, this CD includes photos, lyrics and liner notes in the booklet.

At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.

Tags: Album of the day, Aquarius Records, Comus, East of Sweden, First Utterance, Folk Rock, Gnostic Dirt, psychedelic folk

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2011 at 1:57 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.