The Comsat Angels - Chasing Shadows

While The Comsat Angels were oft-trivialized and underappreciated during their career, the passage of time has afforded them the coveted status of cult heroes. Their records have aged incredibly well in comparison to that of their peers due to exceptional production values other groups lacked. Aided by the powerhouse rhythm section of Mike Glaisher and Kevin Bacon, as well as singer-guitarist Stephen Fellow’s thoughtful introspections and stately guitar lines, The Comsat Angels would eventually break into the commercial market albeit with increasing diminished returns such as the clunky Land (1983) and overproduced 7 Day Weekend (1985).
Struggling to maintain their relevance as a major label act, The Comsat Angels returned to the dark melodicism of their early albums for 1986’s Chasing Shadows after inking a new record deal with the help of fan and label mate Robert Palmer. The record finds the band successfully transforming their previous insipid commercial fluff into genuinely moving material such as the pleading desperation of The Cutting Edge and aching ballad Carried Away. Chasing Shadows is especially noteworthy for containing Fellow’s finest vocal performance, as evident with the dark rock swagger of Under the Influence and plaintive Pray for Rain.
Robert Palmer himself shows up on You’ll Never Know, while Bacon’s throbbing, commanding bass drives The Thought That Counts. Keyboardist Andy Peake provides further emotional weight, as washes of ambient pads and electric piano give the record a slight adult contemporary flavour. Admittedly, a large portion of The Comsat Angel’s canon is spotty at best. However, at the height of their prowess they made some of the finest music to come out of Britain in the early 1980s. Chasing Shadows remains an exemplary record in The Comsat Angel’s discography and proved after a string of duds that the band was no one-trick pony.

The Comsat Angels - 7 Day Weekend

The Comsat Angels willingly became part of the '80s hit-making machine for 7 Day Weekend and lived to regret it. Aside from the exposure gained by the use of "I'm Falling" in the movie Real Genius, the piles of money dumped into numerous recording sessions and multi-format singles did little to improve the band's profile. With the sound overhaul also came the inevitable image update. Long-time fans might not have known what the band looked like until setting their sights on the cover of 7 Day Weekend, an odd development for such an artsy bunch. The failure of Land to break through the charts didn't dissuade the effort to hit the mainstream. There's slightly less use of synths, but it's generally a common rock record from 1985. At its worst, it sounds like bad Bryan Adams, usually during guitar solos. At its best, you can hear the drive of the band's first three records. Those moments are fleeting, most apparent on the spirited "You Move Me" and the funky "I'm Falling." Both songs are just as good as any Simple Minds hit from the same period, but the Comsats don't seem as comfortable in their confines. Otherwise, 7 Day is washy by any band's standard. The piecemeal manner in which the album was recorded surprisingly doesn't lend a disjointed feeling, but a few of the choices for producers are undeniably baffling, including funk/R&B master James Mtume and hard rock staple Chris Tsangarides, who was fresh from a Y&T session. Time hasn't been good to the record, but Connoisseur's 2001 reissue sounds excellent. It also adds a couple bonus tracks, including their version of the Rolling Stones' "Citadel."

The Comsat Angels - Missing In Action [Expanded] + Do The Empty House 7"EP

Waiting for a Miracle is a sorcerous first album; at least once it sinks in, after short-to-long phases of puzzlement, bemusement, and fascination. Its songs of romantic ruin, paranoia, and doubt are spare, inelastic, and ceaselessly on edge. Even when the songs are at their bounciest and most alluring, they have an insular and alien quality. The instruments are played with intrepid simplicity, but when they're heard as one, they sound peculiar and complex albeit with insidious lyrical hooks that are innocuous to the eye and startling to the ear, like "This is total war, girl," "Sometimes I feel out of control," and "I can't relax 'cause I haven't done a thing and I can't do a thing 'cause I can't relax."

Acting as something like a minimalist garage band with one foot in the past and the other in the future, with Andy Peake's memory-triggering organ bleats offset by structural abnormalities and twists, the band does come across as a little timid from time to time, unsure of how far to take its uniqueness, but it's only another factor that fosters the album's insistent nerviness. "Total War," a razor-sharp examination of a relationship snapping under the pressure of buried mutual contempt, threatens to stop as often as it appears to be on the verge of taking off, carries a circular arrangement, and provides no release. It was the album's "other" single, nearly as conventions-stripped as PiL's more venomous "Flowers of Romance" (released the following year).

"Independence Day," on the other hand, gave the band its greatest commercial success, wrapping all the band's strengths in one concise package, from the brilliantly paced shifts between the sparse and the dense to the balance between the direct and the indirect. Apart from the barren, ominous kiss-off that is "Postcard," each of the remaining songs sound like singles, even if they never had a chance at putting the band on Top of the Pops. (This is a band that called itself "doomsteady" with a hint of seriousness, after all.)

While there are crucial differences that reveal themselves after deep listening, this album can be appreciated by anyone touched by other maverick post-punk albums released the same year, such as Joy Division's Closer, Associates' The Affectionate Punch, Magazine's The Correct Use of Soap, The Sound's Jeopardy, and Simple Minds' Empires and Dance.

Often overlooked, Waiting For A Miracle deserves to be up there alongside Wire’s ‘154’, The Cure’s ‘Seventeen Seconds’, The Gang Of Four's 'Entertainment' and Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’….In those murky, post-punk days, many chose the solemn, Joy Division style path, whilst others, like The Comsat Angels chose a more optimistic route and held out for their own miracle. For that reason alone, surely they are to be applauded, for bringing light to those dark, dark days.