Album Review: Comet Control, Inside the Sun
Whether you would skip delightedly across planetary orbits like so many invisible jump ropes or drift serene through a sea of nebular gases, Comet Control are your one-stop shop. The prismatic Toronto space — the final frontier? yes! — adventurers built themselves a whole studio to make their third LP, and, well, it worked. Inside the Sun collects eight new tracks for the Tee Pee Records follow-up to 2016’s Center of the Maze (review here), running an immersive and at times peaceful but not at all staid 45 minutes across two well delineated sides of melodic psychedelia. Be it in opener “Keep on Spinnin'” or its side B counterpart title-track, wherein the drums of Andrew Moszynski (Marco Mozin fills the role live) punctuate in submotorik fashion an outbound shove of intention, or in later, less-or-un-percussed folkish stretches like “The Afterlife” and closer “The Deserter,” the last of which finds Jay Lemak‘s keys complemented by guest violin from Sophie Trudeau — who plays in Godspeed You! Black Emperor and, mathematically speaking, either is or is not related to the Canadian prime minister — Comet Control‘s depth of sound and flowing graciousness of craft comes across as the most crucial element of who they are.
They put the rockers up front, and the first sound one hears on “Keep on Spinnin'” is a wake-the-hell-up drum fill from Moszynski that stops dead before the guitars of founding principals Chad Ross (also vocals) and Andrew Moszynski kick in to lead the way out of the atmosphere on a rocket fueled by fuzz-laced shuffle, bass and drums the engine driving upward and outward as the keys add melodic flourish to the vocals, complementing the spaces between verse lines. It is a purposefully movement-minded, rhythmic leadoff. A statement. It does not reveal everything about Comet Control‘s intentions throughout Inside the Sun — it’s not a full summary or anything like that — but the facts that it’s one of two songs running over seven minutes long, that it starts the record, and that it’s the most active inclusion on it aren’t a coincidence. The band clearly wants to convey the feeling of motion, maybe even of being alive after five years of absence. One does not begrudge the boogie. And even as they move into a noisy wash in the song’s second half, only to stop dead once again and speak the single word “spinnin’,” they bring that keyboard line back around to top the reemergent push, and the melody’s never far off.
If it matters, everything that follows is slower to some degree — though I’m not about to compare BPMs with “Secret Life” (premiered here) to find how by how close the two are exactly — but side A remains uptempo, defined in no small part by its initial axial directive. The shaker-inclusive chug of “Welcome to the Wave” finds its verse tempting Rolling Stones comparisons, but the quick hook hints at mellower vibes to come, the song’s title-line arriving in the lines “Moving in and out of phase/Welcome to the wave,” later, the urging, “Go inside the wave,” just before the solo. It is bright in that wave, and duly undulating, but again, the rhythm section acts as the anchor, and that shaker’s right there the whole time, earning its place among the final elements to stand at the end of the track, cutting off before “Secret Life” — the shortest inclusion at 3:40 and another kick in pace, howling in guitar, punchy in snare, and right on for the duration — takes over, lead lines trilling like a theremin amid a spirit that feels near to garage rock but is fuller in its sound than anything so willfully raw. Somehow it’s a fitting point of dimensional shift to the more languid but still rolling “Good Day to Say Goodbye.”
Taking Inside the Sun as a linear progression, the dream-keys and organ of “Good Day to Say Goodbye,” the nodding groove, bright melody and anchoring fuzz riff around which it’s based serves as a vital transition to what follows on the second half of the record. The longest song at 7:27, it also offers a reminder that Ross and Moszynski worked together in Quest for Fire before Comet Control‘s 2014 self-titled debut (review here), and is fair enough ground for them to cover, hitting a midpoint in tempo between the “Keep on Spinnin'” and “Secret Life” before and “The Afterlife” and “The Deserter” still to come while giving space — there’s that word again — for the title-track and the penultimate “Heavy Moments” to unfurl amid the lushness that surrounds. “Inside the Sun” itself feels broad because it is, guitars swirling by its end in a way that lets the listener know they’re not coming back this time, and that’s suitable to shift into the outright headphone-ready gorgeousness of “The Afterlife.” It is also how side B embodies the back-and-forth ethic of Inside the Sun on the whole. Where the first half of the album played off pace between fastest and middle gears, the second oozes further into drift the alternating pattern, especially in “The Deserter” at the finish, speaking to just how far Comet Control are ready to go.
Understand: there is no conflict in this. Even if it is a case of competing impulses in the writing, that doesn’t come through in the finished product, which is all the more to the band’s credit since they’re working in their own studio for the first time. Rather, the post-’90s-alt wistfulness in the guitar of “Heavy Moments” offers a smooth letting go into “The Deserter,” which unfolds with such patience as to make its relatively short four-and-half-minute runtime deceptive. Keys and effects swirl begin, vocals arrive, bass, drums follow gradually, the aforementioned violin becoming a part of the whole with marked ease. It is perhaps in these final minutes that Comet Control most reinforce what’s been uniting the material all along through the back and forth. Aside from the overarching course they’ve set into the ether, it is the melody that brings the songs together throughout Inside the Sun. Of course that’s not to take anything away from what the rhythm section does throughout in reinforcing the trajectory — that work is crucial to the impression made by the album as a whole and the individual tracks as pieces of it — but as they ebb and flow, Comet Control are no less purposeful in their soothing last stretch than they were in the outset’s relative intensity. It is the willingness to be beautiful that makes Inside the Sun so encompassing.
I enjoyed getting into this one too.
https://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/comet-control-inside-the-sun/