Comus

If your idea of a good time is something along the lines of setting light to virgins in wicker effigies, then Comus could be right up your street. Even if you harbour no such homicidal tendencies, they’re still a damn fine listen.

Comus inhabit that most spectral of sub-genres, acid-folk – A blend of the psychedelic and the folkish, underpinned by a progressive foundation. It’s an area of music renowned for its ethereal eeriness, oft-beauty, and mystical meanderings…

… Except nobody seemed to have told Comus that, for their 1971 debut, First Utterance, is, to put it bluntly, quite terrifying.

Taking their name from Milton’s 17^th century masque, featuring a wild wood ruled over by the pagan sorcerer King Comus, the band recorded, quite possibly, the most unnerving example of progressive/psych/acid –folk, or any other musical niche, ever to be committed to a waxy disc.

Subject matter ranges from sexual threat to sacrifice to mental illness, and it’s all delivered in such a freakishly disturbing way that had Edward Woodward heard it prior to landing his biplane, he’d have turned and fled Summerisle long before the flames were licking at his ankles.

First Utterance is nothing short of brilliant. It’s hell on your own doorstep – The Wicker Man soundtrack that never was. From the opening bars of ‘Diana’ to the closing barked repetition of “insane” on ‘The Prisoner’, this album grabs you by your god-fearing sensibilities and refuses to let go. This is thanks in no small part to the uniquely unsettling vocal delivery of Roger Wootton and the sylph-like female voice of Bobbie Watson drifting in and out of the mix.

As such, a song as innocuously titled as ‘Diana’ is far more disquieting with its description of the titular heroine (a metaphor for virtue) being stalked “through the steaming woodlands” by a lustful, unseen presence.

'Drip Drip', with its medieval murder, is intimidating and horrific in turns – “As I carry you to your grave, My arms your hearse” – and the sinister ‘Song to Comus’ and ‘The Bite’, which nails its colours to the mast with the (undoubtedly) Pagan sacrifice of a Christian, ensures sleepless nights for all.

If Pagan murmurings in the deepest, darkest woods are your thing, then Comus’s First Utterance is undoubtedly your bag. If, like me, they’re not, but you like your music dark, edgy and seething with a undercurrent of barely suppressed malevolence, then I can’t recommend this album enough.

Comus, unlike the laughable Incredible String Band, are everything that’s right about acid-folk music.

Reassuringly creepy, once First Utterance has been heard, it won’t be forgotten. damn fine listen.--Headfullofsnow

DRIP, DRIP


DIANA