Comus
First Utterance

THE REVIEW

Recommended to me by a lively tormentor following a sufficiently heated discussion, here is "First Utterance," the initial and abundant cartridge discharge from this extraordinary English band called Comus. This work, predominantly built on brilliant but deliberately disordered medieval metrics, represents the possibility of dazzling any musical score that a normal staff could contain.

I am forced to paraphrase some of the comments that preceded me, where I can confirm the presence of sounds with a rather sinister timbre, determined by wild screams, incessant percussion on thick leather, and impromptu lung compressions worthy of the embryonic highs of Cro-Magnon.

The cascades of brilliant and extremely clean arpeggios present in "The herald," collide, inevitably shattering upon contact with the knowledgeable yet contrasting violin strokes, where the sometimes dark and other times harmonious sound of a flute manages to stabilize the channeled orchestrations. Noteworthy is the bloody "Drip drip," well-based on a latent vocal exercise interpreted by both male and female voices, which, despite everything, manage to create an intersection, despite the favoring guttural qualities of the former with the seemingly celestial ones of the latter.

The strings are undoubtedly of great emotional impact, starting with the opening piece that presents, on a rudimentary stage, the lashes of a heavy and mossy double bass. Essentially, the structure of the work is characterized by powerful musical vortices that evoke sounds of ancient memory well blended with the potentials foreseen by the equipment from the early 70s. Such devices leave few if any traces, and here perhaps lies the beauty of the album, whose prevailing characteristic is the meticulous mixture of sounds created artistically by the sole members of the group. Sounds that flow, never breaching the banks, in a single channel designed by the same. There are no incursions from different latitudes; everything suddenly sprouts from the fertile ground of Comus, where even the only existing echo manages to surprise the audio of the listener the moment they seem to have escaped it.

Monumental work of a group that could have saved some cartridges to fire in a fireworks display with other publications that never occurred except for "To keep from crying," which would cast them into an undeserved oblivion already at the end of the recordings of the latter. A shame.