Howlin Rain
Howlin Rain

I don't know what I would give to get inside the mind of Ethan Miller, guitarist and singer of the hard-psycho noise epigones Comets on Fire. Perhaps he must have felt like a Picasso scoffed at for those paintings with the ear in place of the nose, derided like a painter without a sense of proportion and harmony, so he got fed up and created a painting as Raphael would command, just to show that he can do these "simple" things with his eyes closed.

Well, for once Ethan has put aside the iconoclastic fury and noise overload of the blazing comets and, with the help of John Moloney's drums from Sunburn Hand of the Man and the metalworker Ian Gradek on bass, he shows everyone how to play the "classics".

If this were 1971, this album would pass over the record store counter a multitude of times a day, because with a single stroke you bring home Allmann Brothers Band, Blue Cheer, Crazy Horses, Creedence, Faces, Free, Grateful Dead, Humble Pie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, ... and so on all the way to the letter Zeta.

Don't believe it? Put on "Death prayer in heaven's orchard" and the dream comes true: Ellioth's raspy voice is as fiery as Fogerty's which for once in a lifetime has become the singer of the Grateful Dead accompanying the liquid six strings of master Jerry.

"Calling lightning with a scythe" begins like a "sweet" choral ballad with banjo and mandolin as if it had come out of one of the great albums of Rod Stewart from the early '70s (rediscover them, for heaven's sake!!!) only to transform into an indescribably furious guitar maelstrom (the only concession of the album to the project's noise demands) that calms down just to let the mandolins close it again!

And "Roll on the rusted days"? It's the track missing from the best album of the Spirit with Randy California's guitar fuzz, the choruses go doo doo daaa and we are all happy & content to be thirty years younger while the sax collapses on the ground dragging the snare drum and some cymbals with it! "The Hanging Heart" starts directly with the fuzz of the guitar still hot from the previous track until it sublimates into a jam between Steve Marriot's Faces and the Black Crowes.

"In  Sand and Dirt" is psychedelically disturbed like a trip right up to the very tips of your hair and it takes some effort to reach it.

With  "The firing of the midnight rain" I let myself be lulled by the ballad that stands   between the tumultuous hormones of professor Skynyrd's students and the softness of Frampton from Humble Pie.

Madonna, is it already over after eight tracks? Give me more!

What do you say? Too good to be true? Too many references to be credible? Who cares! Sometimes to be happy all it takes is a bit of recklessness and twenty euros...

Five stars, without any remorse.