Customer Reviews

Glamour

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I finally got hold of a copy of this album a couple of weeks ago. It is incredible! There is so much melody for these songs to be able to rock as much as they do. The first listen is a little claustrophobic - there is little room to breathe in these arrangements - but that's part of this album's strength. It is so tight, so produced, yet still a little budgeted, there are some jagged edges. This is my second Comsats album. I previously found Fiction (which is also incredible), and the difference between that album's sparseness and this album's steady rock feel - complete with actual steady rhythm guitar and distorted riffs, pounding drums, thumping bass - is really shocking. The whole set of songs is strong. And its very easy to let it wash over you. The strongest tracks, in my opinion, are: "Web of Sound" a pop-rock gem, "Sailor" a sweeping anthemic rocker, "Pacific Ocean Blues" with its gorgeous guitar arpeggios and nice bass line (a Comsat trademark, as I understand), "Demon Lover" a nice mock-gothic rock piece, and "Valley of The Nile" which could have been the last song on the album, since it is kind of cyclical and subliminal while at the same time being gorgeous and attention grabbing. Actually, like I said, every track is solid - that's what makes THE GLAMOUR so good. Steve Fellow's vocals and lyrics are strong throughout, the playing is excellent, the arrangements are tight, the production a little light but at the same time very deliberate. A very very nice swan song for the Comsats. Now if I could only get hold of the others. If you can find The Glamour or Fiction, they are both worth the import prices. Trust me!

Just to support what Michael Abernethy wrote earlier about this CD: it is indeed a masterpiece. Already in the early 1980s, when the group was releasing LPs first on Polydor and then on Jive in the UK, I described the Comsat Angels' music to my friends as "expansive rock à la U2 with richer melodies, a nagging underlying tension, and without the sanctimonious self-righteousness". (Or as David Lee Roth is said to have put it: "U2 have a VERY important message. Unfortunately, it's also a very long one...")

Michael Abernethy's CD copy of "Fiction", the last of the three Polydor LPs, was presumably the UK CD reissue of the mid-1990s on the RPM label. RPM also reissued at that time the first two Polydor LPs, "Waiting For A Miracle" and "Sleep No More", together with a CD of live performances recorded for radio in the Netherlands, where the group enjoyed its greatest success (such as it was); to the best of my knowledge, the Jive LPs have never been reissued on CD. All are superb. As I wrote elsewhere on this website with respect to the mid-1990s Polydor-Germany CDs of Katrina & The Waves, the Comsat Angels are a totally undeservedly hidden treasure; find them out and regale yourself.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

I have been waiting an eternity to get a copy of The Glamour. Thank you Renascent for coordinating the re-issue of this and the others.

And I would be person number 12.

There is a story that in 1995, the Comsat Angels played their last live gig at a club in Britain to an audience of only 10 people. After 17 years of struggle, the size of the crowd that night was the final straw...the band called it quits. To think that this was the music they must have played there, the story seems more tragic. The Glamour is a double album of 20 songs, without any filler. This is a departure from earlier work; original bass player Kevin Bacon left the band and was replaced, and there was the addition of a second guitar player. The new line-up, plus the effort to cover various styles (psychedelic, grunge), give the Comsats a whole new sound. And it works. Standout tracks include Oblivion, The Niala Game, Breaker and Sailor. Even demo track Slayer Of The Real is a gem. If only I could travel back in time, I would go back to 1995 and make my way to the club where they played. I would be person number 11.

The final studio album by the Comsat Angels was also their longest one. This reissue makes it even longer, adding seven tracks that weren't on the original release, and expanding the album to two discs. It's easier now to understand what the band was trying to do at the time -- The Glamour is kind of like the Comsat Angels' version of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, half harsh guitar-rock and half dreamy ballads, also with a few long and meandering compositions. The problem, I think, is that it isn't similar enough, in some sense, to the Smashing Pumpkins' opus.

Most noticeably, the production is very unflattering. If The Glamour had had the benefit of a good nineties production (like Mellon Collie did), it might have made a much better impression. But, the album jacket says, "produced by no one," and it sounds like it. Even in the loudest rockers, the guitars and drums sound weak and thin. They never attain that muscular, energetic sound that all the best rock songs have. Instead, it sounds kind of like they took the mannered, restrained guitar style associated with their early work, and tried to use it to play hard rock. The songs strain to be rough and noisy, but never quite succeed.

Stephen Fellows' voice also sounds weak and straining. Which is odd, since he was in good form on My Mind's Eye. Maybe it's because of the production again. If his voice sounded deep and dramatic, like on Sleep No More, or calm and reflective like on My Mind's Eye, it would have greatly improved many of these songs. But he really doesn't sound that confident here, and even when the music sounds kind of interesting, his delivery tends to mismatch its tone. The one time he tries to sound calm and collected, in "I Hear A New World," it's actually quite effective.

But it's not just the production. In fact, the loud rockers just aren't that strong to begin with. I thought My Mind's Eye used a few generic alt-rock templates, but The Glamour uses nothing else. The songs repeat basic rhythms, but none of them has the kind of sharp, concise riff that characterized the best nineties alt-rock (like the Smashing Pumpkins' "Zero"). Instead, they just go for speed or volume, which doesn't really work since they're still not that fast or loud. You can't say the band didn't try -- they even replaced their original bassist with two new guys -- but it seems that they were just out of good ideas at this point. I almost wish they had tried to make a Smashing Pumpkins-style album, with a harder production and greater emphasis on pop hooks and guitar riffs, but The Glamour is kind of neither here nor there. Sometimes they even repeat themselves -- the riff in "Goddess" is very similar to the one in "My Mind's Eye."

The Glamour doesn't have even one candidate for a good single, which shows its weakness among Comsat Angels albums. Even their synth-pop detour Seven Day Weekend had at least two pop gems that rivaled any of their early singles, and My Mind's Eye had the superb "Field Of Tall Flowers." But here, even the most ingratiating guitar songs have a strange plodding feel.

The slow songs are better. In fact, the first disc has three good excursions into dream-pop: "Valley Of The Nile," with a string section, one of the few times they go beyond their usual compositional range; "Sailor," built on brooding, restrained guitar strumming, one of the few times the guitar takes on a good atmospheric sound; and "The Niala Game," one of the previously unreleased songs, with prominent bass and a faraway, daydreaming tone in the vocals. These songs still don't have any stand-out hooks or musical phrases, but the mood is affecting. Any of them could be included into a hypothetical best-of disc to show off the band's more textured side. But, unfortunately, three good slow songs don't quite make for a good twenty-song double album, especially not a double album that emphasizes loud guitars. The other slow songs tend to repeat the ideas of these three -- "Slayer Of The Real" has a great title, but the song itself is a fairly pedestrian vocals-and-guitar ballad.

There are also two long songs (over seven minutes), both analogous to "Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans" by the Smashing Pumpkins (if only they had been analogous to "Zero" instead) -- a pretty slow section, then a guitar freakout. Unfortunately, the band still can't come up with an engaging guitar solo (their strength always lay more in post-punk drone guitar), so there's not much development in the songs, and the soft and hard sections don't seem to be connected naturally, sounding more like disparate demos that were arbitrarily spliced together. Other songs like "Breaker" or "Pacific Ocean Blues" have the same weird fragmented quality, reminiscent of the band's very first album Waiting For A Miracle, except drawn out to a longer running time, and with more vague lyrics. The lyrics, by the way, aren't very impressive -- it may just be that Fellows can't bring them to life with his delivery, but even the good songs get by on mood more than words or music.

I don't know...I enjoy a lot of the Comsat Angels' music, but aside from the three dream-pop numbers on the first disc and a couple of other songs, I don't really feel like listening to most of The Glamour ever again. If you're curious about their late work, My Mind's Eye is an excellent album. I don't think The Glamour would interest anyone but the most dedicated fans, though.