COMUS

Comus is a band that was started in 1969 by Roger Wooton and Glenn Goring, who performed in folk shows prior. They would turn from a duo to a six piece band by the 70s, and during that time they would begin writing their first record of First Utterance. They wouldn't quite gain much threshold in the commercial sphere, however many popular artists like David Bowie and Mikael Akerfeldt would find appreciation for their craft.

For me, Comus took a bit to set in for me. I remember hearing them in the summer of 2021, exploring any proggy stuff I can get my hands on. That summer was when I discovered many acts I would grow to really love and appreciate, like Frank Zappa, Can, Magma, Swans, and The Residents. Among those groups was Comus, however my first impression of the band was rocky. Trust me when I say this, I did not like this album when I first heard it. It felt TOO weird, which was odd since I liked The Residents. There was just something I didn't like about the music Comus made, it just did not click for me. However, now as I listened to plenty of bands, like Faust, Current 93, and y'know, bands that are much MUCH more abstract and weirder than Comus?and also after listening to this album a bit more throughout the week, I grew to quite like them.

I don't quite think of it as the masterpiece people say it is, I still think there are some issues I have with this record, but a lot of the good stuff outweighs the bad. For starters, I really love the instrumentation here. It is a manic, psychedelic affair of both chaos, beauty, and horror, wrapped in an almost rock-like texture. At points it is jarring, at other points it is very jarring, and at rare moments it is incredibly gorgeous, but all of it feels like Comus. You know, I think this is one of those times where the album art and the music match, because this sounds like music envisioned by a disheveled, skinned down, old man, lying, crying and screaming. It is as freak folk as you could get, and it's all very greatly put together.

I also adore Bobbie Watson's vocals here. She appears on most of the songs, being backing vocals for a lot of them, however with the exception of The Herald. Her vibrant, lush voice contrasts the rest of the music, but still manages to put an off atmosphere, as if she too is one with the man on the cover, but just hides it better than the rest of the crew here.

Speaking of vocals, I am not quite a fan of Wootton's vocals. Well, more accurately, they kinda get tiring after a while. At first with tracks like Diana and Drip Drip, his vocal works are pretty dang strong, being quite in tune and eclectic in his vibratos, and for the first time pretty favorable. However after Song To Comus they start to get rather old for me, and at times annoying. Points like The Bite and The Prisoner make me wish he let the music breathe a bit more without spouting a bunch of, while good, very dark and cryptic lyrics at us.

The second side in general certainly isn't as good as the first for me. While I do really enjoy Song to Comus?The Bite, Bitten, and The Prisoner just aren't really that strong of tracks in retrospect to the magnificent Diana, the gorgeous The Herald, and the oppressively epic Drip Drip. At the point of these tracks, the sound of Comus has kind of played a bit too long for me, and while I can appreciate what the band was going for with these tracks, they just don't interest me as much as what the first half delivers. To say the least, this album is top heavy. I think it would be much better if the album tracks were Diana and the extended 12 minute version of The Herald on one side, and Drip Drip and Song To Comus on the other. That is at least what I believe should've gone down within this album's tracks.

All that aside, there is one song in particular that I really love, and consider to be the band's masterpiece, that being Diana. Now it may be there more popular track, I know, it was their lead single on this record, and it may not be as epic as The Herald or Drip Drip, but Diana contains so much in so little time that it all makes up for it with abstract freaky folk, proggy moments that can make even King Crimson shed a tear, and probably the best Roger has ever sounded on this record, and maybe his whole career. My favorite part of this whole song is the bongo solo provided by Rob Young, which honestly kinda weirdly reminds me of the guitar solos on Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas. I mean, both are probably both band's biggest singles, with both being amazing prog tracks that fit a ton of stuff in pretty short time windows. Weird comparisons to a completely different kind of band out of the way, this song is just awesome to me, and it is certainly one of the best progressive folk songs to be put out.

While First Utterance did not give me a good first impression, I grew to really like this album, and certainly see why many people consider it an amazing progressive folk output. I say give it a spin if you wanna check out some weird, psychedelic folk music, you may find a treasured record waiting to be unlocked.

The first Comus album. Dark and folky. In terms of the music, this album is already amazing, but it is really the vocals that throw me off. The duets can sound whiny at times. That's not even the bad part. The lyrics are so hard to make out, I had to look them all up. But it was worth it. These lyrics found on 'Diana' are honestly beautiful. They fit well with the vocals to create a sense of fear and anxiety. 'The Herald', the longest song on the album, has some deep and depressing lyrics, and the guitar found about one third through the song reminds me a lot of Fleetwood Mac. Exactly eight minutes is a tribal-sounding interlude with a violin and a recorder (I think), which leads back into the main melody to complete the song with a heart-wrenching set of la-la-las. Then there is 'Drip Drip' which has unusually sensual lyrics. For some reason I cannot explain, the first seconds of this song sound like Radiohead's 'Spectre'. A hoedown-y interlude is found about halfway through. This track has a very fun chorus. Makes you want to get up and shout out 'DRIP DRIP DRIP'. 'Song to Comus' is a song about rape. It has some of the dumbest echoing ever. No tape looping or anything like that. The two vocalists just repeating with lowering voices. It's still not a bad song, though. Some fun Ian Anderson-esque flute is found in this track. 'The Bite' seems to be about suicide. Another morbid track on a morbid album. 'Bitten' is the most unsettling song on this album. Short and instrumental, it doesn't last long, but it manages to capture a lot of fear in two minutes. 'The Prisoner' is a song about the mentally ill. A nice, grim closing to Comus's first album.

The first spooky song "Diana" conjures up a dark satanic image of nefarious goings-on at a witches coven. The focus of this supernatural hocus pocus hokum is mainly on the unsettling violins and off-kilter harmonising from the witches choir giving the music a dark macabre sinister edge. It's creepy and disturbing folk (although that's no reflection on the band members themselves) which is very reminiscent of the eerie folk music in the paganistic horror movie, "The Wicker Man" starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee. The hair-raising lyrics to "Diana" are pretty scary too:- "Lust he follows virtue close, Through the steaming woodlands, His darkened blood through bulging veins, Through the steaming woodlands." ..... It's enough to send a shiver up the spine and give you a touch of the heebie-jeebies. You might be tempted to leave the lights on at night after listening to this creepy witches brew of Halloween music, but try not to have nightmares. The next song "The Herald" is a 12-minute Psych-Folk masterpiece, which still has the same sinister air of a midnight mass at a witches coven, but it's a strangely beautiful song at the same time. The music is carried along on a wave of gently rippling guitar strings and violins with the hauntingly-beautiful vocals of Bobbie Watson sounding somehow sweet and angelic, so maybe she's a harmless white witch and not a dark satanic black witch after all. If the first two songs haven't already given you the creeps though, then the third song "Drip Drip" surely will. The music is a 10-minute-long barrelling ghost train ride, ending in a helter-skelter Psych- Folk frenzy, featuring some absolutely manic violin playing and tortured and strangulated vocals from lead singer Roger Wootton. The lyrics are very dark and disturbing too so I won't recite them here, other than to say, the "Drip Drip" refers to the drips of blood from a hanging corpse. Enough said. This is definitely not the kind of folk album you'd want to buy your dear old aunt for Christmas as it'd probably scare the living daylights out of her.

The seven and a half minute "Song to Comus" opens Side Two. It's a dark and disturbing tale of a damsel in distress having her virginity forcibly taken by the monstrous Comus of the title. The music is an infectious fluty Prog-Folk number which sounds like a mad and unhinged version of Jethro Tull. The demented vocalist is clearly going ever so slightly mad here, sounding like a deranged inmate on day release from a lunatic asylum, where "care in the community" clearly hasn't worked. It brings to mind the manic 1966 novelty record "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" ..... Watch out! There's a werewolf about in the next song "The Bite". This guitar, violin and flute melody gallops along at an absolutely insane pace, with the musicians barely coming up for air in this manic 5-minute psychedelic freak-out. The dark mood deepens with "Bitten", a brief 2-minute instrumental, featuring the lonely sound of a mournful violin. The final song "The Prisoner" is another manic manifestation of deeply disturbing music, which takes us on a terrifying paranoid schizophrenic ride to hell. It's quite literally a tale of sheer lunacy, because it's all about a disturbed mental patient being given electro-convulsive "therapy" against their will. It's shocking! "The Prisoner" is pretty scary, but it's probably not as scary as the thought of watching back to back episodes of Prisoner Cell Block H.

Dare you enter the weird and sinister world of Comus? There's nowt so Wyrd as the paganistic freaky folk of Comus. This unsettling and disturbing Psych-Folk music is as unnerving as a stay in a haunted house on the night of a full moon during a thunderstorm at Halloween. This frightfully good album contains more Black Magic than a box of dark chocolates. It's a dark descent into madness, death, witchcraft and supernatural fairy tales, but it's also a very good album too. "First Utterance" might not appeal to Prog-Rock fans generally, but if you're in the mood for a scary Friday the 13th outbreak of infectious freaky folk, then this might just be the album for you. Just make sure you secure all of the doors and windows before settling down to listen to this dark and menacing album in the middle of the night, because you never know who or what might be lurking out there in the darkness.

The mini-suite "The Herald" (12:12), perhaps the most important piece of the Lp, it starts as psychedelic folk, acid-folk, with female voices you do not know if demonic or angelic, after 3'40'' the song fades and then starts again with guitar arpeggio, then violin that becomes melancholy and poignant, beautiful melody (great work by Colin Pearson), then about 9'40'' that is after 6 minutes from the pause, it starts the initial entries again. The structure is verse - chorus (of higher hue), then central instrumental piece, then again verse - chorus. Rating 8,5.

"Drip Drip" (10:54) begins with a beautiful acoustic guitar arpeggio, but soon the track becomes dissonant, high-pitched lyiser singing, Wootton sings almost as Roger Chapman, and the listening becomes difficult, the percussions that in the previous piece were not there, here are very important and at about 6'30', after a very dissonant piece, it changes the melody, comes the percussion, the melody remains in the background and is stretched, deformed, the music comes to parorosism. Rating 7.5/8.

End of Side A.

The fourth piece, "Song To Comus (7:30), proceeds with the distorted paroxysmal climate of the previous one, the song resembles that of Jethro Tull, it is interesting as Comus manage to combine the melody with this hallucinatory paroxysmal mood that at times seems almost demented, and one wonders how long they can keep this inspiration so cohesive and obsessively centered on this hallucinatory atmosphere. Rating 8.

"The Bite (5:26)" is very fast, the rhythm is sustained, and again we listen to the continuum of the same pagan poem, dark mood, demonic sound. Rating 8. 6. Bitten (2:15) is an instrumental piece, acoustic, whose atmosphere is terrible and frightening, and it is a good idea to put a break, a short instrumental piece after songs so similar. Rating 8.

The last piece, "The Prisoner" (6:14), begins at a rhythm, similar to Diana, percussion, female voices, Wootton's hoarse voice, the music is so homogeneous with the previous ones that it adds nothing in terms of musical material, and closes an album all too granite, dense, almost monotonous as the Comus have eviscerated their musical material in a capillary way and the album ends with the pastoral, acidic, folk, hallucinatory psychedelic obsession that crystallized the album. Rating 7,5.

it is a masterpiece of inspiration and especially of intensity rather than broad views because it focuses on a single style, a single mood, a single sound, a single atmosphere developed very well, but at the same time this intensity crystallized on a single atmosphere also determines the limit of the LP, which certainly falls into what I consider real masterpieces but not in the absolute masterpieces of (prog) rock.

Medium quality of the songs: 8. Rating 9+, Five Stars.

The album went under the radar by even the band members themselves. They, themselves, had not even known what a gem they had produced. After "First Utterance" hit the market in 1971, the band quickly splintered and scattered off into their own respective worlds. Roger Wootton would continue the brand name COMUS only to fall into the commercial trappings of the music industry and released the utterly disappointing followup "To Keep From Crying" four years later. After that fiasco he was enticed to fall even deeper into the lame-o-sphere by recording solo projects that utilized cheap poppy calypso and cheesy middlebrow compositions of mediocrity. By the mid-70s, it was inconceivable that COMUS ever released one of the most renowned cult albums in the entire history of music. However, that one album of pure genius and divine intervention did not go unnoticed. Over the ensuing decades, "First Utterance" became one of the most revered albums of the entire dark freak folk universe.

As the decades elapsed, new generations who experienced "First Utterance" for the first time were floored by the sheer intensity of the album which led to a new generation of progressive folk inspired music that emerged in the form of Mikael Åkerfeldt adopting lyrics from "Drip Drip" for the title of an Opeth album "My Arms, Your Hearse." He would continue this trend on "Ghost Reveries" with the track "The Baying Of The Hounds" from the track "Diana." Likewise David Tibet would also find inspiration in "Diana" by including his own demented version on the Current 93 album "Horsey" released in 1997.

Something clearly resonated with the COMUS debut as it did with yours truly and still remains one of those musical gifts from the gods, in this case, the party god COMUS. After the train wreck followup of "To Keep From Crying," it seemed unthinkable that COMUS would ever emerge from the shadows to release what could be regarded as a "proper" followup, but finally in 2012, the year that ends the Mayan calendar, that's exactly what they did with OUT OF THE COMA. The 2008 reunion concert in Sweden only reinforced the momentum and it seems the conspiracy of action was inevitable.

First of all, OUT OF THE COMA should not be viewed as a bona fide followup to "First Utterance." Instead it would be more appropriately thought of as a proper "what could have been" type of album. I mean, the band never had the proper self-esteem to carry on the"First Utterance" paradigm and literally imploded from the getgo, This album more rightfully corresponds to a "what we really wanted but never happened finally comes to fruition in a less than perfect way" reality. Oh well. In this dimensional plane where the negative and positive dance like drunken ballerinas trying to do the tango, that is good enough for me. OUT OF THE COMA delivers the goods in that regard with three totally new tracks and a less than perfect recording of the lengthy "The Malgaard Suite" which was intended for the authentic second album that never came to be.

The 35 year absence from one of the dark progressive folk's most stunning examples finally ended in 2012 as COMUS released OUT OF THE COMA. Once again, Roger Wootton provided the next stage in his ballpoint cover art which depicts the drunken character of the debut upright and finding a new way to animate itself. Likewise the music follows suite with three extraordinarily good tracks for a band so far removed from their early days. This new rendition of COMUS includes all the original members with only Rob Young (keyboards, percussion, oboe, flute) and Lindsay Cooper (oboe, bassoon, vocals) not finding their way into the new reality of COMUS. The new lineup also includes the new member Jon Seagroatt who plays flute, soprano sax, bass clarinet, percussion and even joins in as recording producer. One major complaint about the album is the incongruous "Introduction by Roger Wootton" that narrated the history of "The Malgaard Suite" on original issues but has thankfully been removed by popular demand. I agree that it was unnecessary and distorted the musical flow.

While one could nitpick to high heaven regarding the 2012 COMUS comeback OUT OF THE COMA, i have to say that this is a very welcome addition to the band's canon that needed to happen to explain the WTF history in a more refined context. Immediately two things hit me like a ton of bricks. Firstly Roger Wootton has lost his vocal range but still remains within the limitations of his vocal range as a much older guy and also that Bobbie Watson is still a supreme goddess who sounds as estrogen filled in the modern era as she did in her primetime, a major wow factor for an aging soprano. Secondly, the new tracks are very much a continuation of the debut. While not exactly outperforming anything from "First Utterance," OUT OF THE COMA more than blows away the substandard "To Keep From Crying" away. It may have taken 41 years to release a proper followup but that's exactly what COMUS did.

Musically the band picks up where "First Utterance" left off. You know, those beautifully constructed raw acoustic darkened stabs in the heart with frenzied execution that implement full acid rock energetic antics in a totally folk based context with utterly haunting atmospheres. The three new tracks exhibit a nicely up to date approach of the past. Exquisitely divine acoustic guitar fingerpicking, beautifully eked out melodies and and the beauty and the beast approach to vocals before metal ever latched onto the idea. The title track, "The Sacrifice" and "The Return" display COMUS' unique brand of freak folk with tribal drumming, lugubrious violin and the expected display of dark subject matter. While some may criticize "The Malgaard Suite" as an incomplete and dreadful underproduced relic from the past that should have been re-created for a bona fide followup album, i have to say that i kinda like it as it is.

OUT OF THE COMA should be accepted for what it is, namely a statement of the band's history rather than a legit followup to "First Utterance." Roger Wootton and company had zero plans ever to revisit the COMUS universe and only succumbed due to the surprising vitality of their debut, a live performance enthusiasm in 2008 and the solicitation of artists like Mikael Åkerfeldt who initiated the whole reunion thing. As far as progressive artists go, rarely do they manage to sustain the spirit that made their heyday so special but despite not exactly living up to the lofty expectations of "First Utterance," COMUS did an amazing job at keeping the feel of yore while living within the confines of the presence. While i like others could've wished for a complete album that faithfully picks up where the debut album left off, i have to admit that i'm very happy that COMUS released this next best thing. Perhaps they were aware of the limitations of releasing an album so many decades into the future and this is simply the best we could've hoped for. While nothing will dethrone the debut from its lofty perch, this comeback is no waste of time in any way.