3 Apr 2012

New Comus Album "Out Of The Coma" On It's Way

This has been on the boil for a while, but I'd missed it. Legendary gloom folkers Comus have a third album ready for release thirty eight years after their second.
We all know the story - one groundbreaking album of amazing gloomy progressive folk, which sold in minimal quantities but which is now viewed as a classic. A second album of similar, sinister material ( The Malgaard Suite etc ) was then rejected by their record label who demanded something with a little more commercial appeal, which they got with the overly commercial "To Keep From Crying" album, which once again sold in minimal quantities, but also got generally rubbish reviews and was viewed as a failure. Band breaks up.
That would have been the end of the story if not for Opeth's Mikael Akerfelt. A massive fan, he managed to convince the band to reform for a live show as part of the Melloboat Festival in Sweden in 2008.
And now against all odds, we have a new album to look forward to on April 30.
Comus in 2012 consists of five original members, Roger Wootton, Bobbie Watson, Glenn Goring, Colin Pearson and Andy Hellaby, plus reeds-player & percussionist Jon Seagroatt from Red Square. 
Part archival release and part new recordings, "Out of the Coma" includes the only known recording of The Malgaard Suite recorded live on a Mono cassette recorder at a college gig in 1972. This is described by the press release as "an aural artifact, a grainy, partly-occluded lens through which we can glimpse, squint-eyed, the past", which I'm guessing translates roughly as a poor quality recording of an historic event. Even so, I'm in.
The real meat though is three lengthy new tracks Out of the Coma, The Sacrifice and The Return which are described as terrifying and have all been enthusiastically received in recent live performance by those lucky enough to see them.
"Out of the Coma" is released on April 30 by Coptic Cat and can be pre-ordered here.

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