Comet Gain / Mathew Sawyer / The Good Gods – 18 October 2008, The Macbeth

This is all most irregular, we’re at a big fat indie bastard of a gig, but there are only four familiar faces here. Where are all the usual indie kids? They can’t all be dancing to ‘Fold Your Hands Child…’ being played in its entirety at How Does If Feel To Be Loved surely? Not when real live Comet Gain are playing?? Usually we see the same people we know and love/have assigned rude nicknames to at these events, but there are different people here. Who are they?

Never mind that, look IT’S JIM RATTAIL!! gliding through the crowd to peer serenely at the band, just like in the olden days! The band he is peering at, though who knows why as they are all men and none of them is wearing a short skirt, is The Good Gods. They are playing rattly, perky, janglingly itchy pop. Sounding like something I taped off John Peel in 1987.

I can’t concentrate properly on Mathew Sawyer as I’m feeling irked (yes, irked!) by the crowd, especially when a glass smashes directly behind me. It’s just off-putting. I catch Mathew’s plaintive voice telling sorry tales to a plucked, strummed, bowed backing. It sounds like hearts growing heavy with soaked up red wine.

Comet Gain are on top form, i.e. every single member of the band is here and on stage AT THE SAME TIME! Genius. They are here to ‘launch’ their new seven inch, ‘Love Without Lies’ which sounds pretty monstrous tonight, rumbling menacingly. Rachel squeezes her eyes shut to belt out the words, hopping about excitedly. David Feck can’t hear his guitar and so spends most of the ‘launching’ of the new song, looking bemused and fiddling about. C’est la Comet Gain. The band also have a new album coming SOON, ‘Broken Record Prayers’, a delicious mish mash hotch potch of odds and sods: olden songs, Peel session tracks and stuff – so that’s the set we get tonight, with them kicking their garage band-ness to the fore for much of it, sounding cranky and essential. There’s a shrugged off version of ‘You Can Hide Your Love Forever’, but we don’t get new dual ‘a' side the day-dreamy ‘Books of California’ as Feck claims to be unable to hit the high notes he needs to sing the song in public. Jon Slade lurks beneath a monstrous cap, but we can still see enough of his face to make our standard in-joke, ‘Look at Jon Slade’s eyes – he’s fucked!’ He isn’t fucked, but it makes us laugh. Excitingly, there are keyboards added to the ‘Gain sound now, with Anne Laure resplendent in a perky wee hat, rattling away on the ivories/plastics/whatever the keys are made of.

As ever it’s all over too soon, the band having to getoff! just as we’re all feeling good and ensconced in CG’s monochrome kaleidoscope world of clever snotty kids, books and poetry and films and punk and soul and the passion of pop and everything and nothing.