Comets On Fire [rank: 313] based on users subscribed

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"After 2004's critically acclaimed Blue Cathedral, one might have expected Comets on Fire to blast off into the cosmos in an infinite flurry of lysergic spasmodicism. Surprising, then, that they should turn in an earthy, more accessible and downright beautiful album as their follow-up. Then again, it is a completely logical progression, but in reverse, sort of. On Avatar their astonishing new album, Comets display development in every direction: as musicians, as songwriters, as arrangers and as singers (?!), without sacrificing one ounce of the intensity that is expected from our heroes. As on Blue Cathedral, the diversity of the material is staggering. Avatar veers from swinging, bluesy explorations to piano-laced, progressive power balladry, to pure tribalism, evoking everyone from the Allmans, to Quicksilver, to Procol Harum, to some insane Fela/Sun Ra/Crazy Horse hybrid, yet remains wholly Comets on Fire. Though they play cleaner and clearer, their firepower is evident and abundant. They have shifted gears and opened themselves up completely. You should do the same.

Avatar—the seven-song, 46-minute follow-up to the band’s critically lauded 2004 Sub Pop debut, Blue Cathedral—is like that long-lost psych-gem from 1973 that the janitor found under a trapdoor at Electric Ladyland, only without all the dust and, like, tape degeneration. Recorded in the shadow of a chicken farm at Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati, California (Tom Waits recorded Bone Machine there, dude) with The Fucking Champs guitarist and perennial studio sorcerer Tim Green (Melvins, Pearls & Brass, etc.), Avatar is a Hammond-enhanced journey to the center of the riff that basks in the fuzzy outer limits of rock’s myriad extrapolations before swooping down, hawk-like, for the long slow goodbye. Whereas Blue Cathedral reveled in the reverb-soaked pleasures of lysergic garage freakouts, feedback witchery, and action-rock improv, Avatar is the result of nine months of fastidious planning, each glorious note and honeyed melody carefully coaxed to its harmonic ideal. The Comets still improvise—and 'freak out'—of course (in fact, the new songs are already being reworked in real time when the band plays live), but when you hear the beatific piano ballad 'Lucifer’s Memory' and euphoric closer 'Hatched Upon the Age,' you’ll understand why Avatar had to be laid to tape just so. It is, in a word (okay, three), totally fucking sweet."

[reproduced or excerpted from band website linked above]