Comus

Here I am !

I gots First Utterance!

About a month ago for 5 bucks.  My friend exposed me to the band a few years ago because he got a vinyl reissue and let me borrow it. 

Its a grooooooood album.  The liner notes even tell you its good.  I mean David Bowie liked the band a lot.  How could they be bad?

I finally nailed down a copy of First Utterance about a month ago, based on recommendations here.  I must say I'm not normally a fan of acoustic folk music, but this turns out to be quite a fine record.  "Diana" has to be my favorite track, as bits of it are frequently lodged in my cranium.....

Comus, I love it, the more i hear it the more hooked I get, First Utterance is pure brutality clothed in beauty and peace.. 

Uroboros wrote: "Drip Drip" particularly is a piece of mean and elegant morbidity conveying a mood that would be hard to match, especially given the style is so unique. I like to thinkof myself as a peaceful and moral person, but I have to admit that song and its lyrics awaken strange feelings in me...

Edited by Gomah - March 12 2007 at 08:47

By the way, for Opeth fans: if you listen to the lyrics of "Diana" and "Drip Drip" closely, you will find some familiar words in there, like "the baying of the hounds" and "my arms, your hearse", respectively. Akerfeldt quoted these and made them part of Opeth's own lyrical universe. I love the album too and I consider it an addictive experience. "Drip Drip" particularly is a piece of mean and elegant morbidity conveying a mood that would be hard to match, especially given the style is so unique. I like to thinkof myself as a peaceful and moral person, but I have to admit that song and its lyrics awaken strange feelings in me...

Re-listened. It's weird, in a weird way. I still don't like it.

I dislike the sample song I heard. 

I got 'To Keep From Crying' on import when it was first released way back when, on the strength of an elaborate advert in Melody Maker and my mates and I really liked it. Sure, some of the tunes are 'catchy' and more commercially oriented but there are some really nice melodies, nice vocals and interesting compositions ,including the mix of the instruments used.

Having only heard excerpts of 'First Utterance' I can't comment further, but I bet those of us whose introduction to Comus was with TKFC still don't understand the all round bagging it seems to get . In fact it seems that we are probably the lucky ones. We've got FU to look forward to. Yes? But maybe after the brightness of TKFC we may just find FU altogether too dark . Maybe,I'll let you know.

I recently bought First Utterance, the Breathless re-issue, and I've been highly disappointed with the sound quality. There's a big section of The Herald and the first 3 minutes of Drip Drip that are marred with huge distortions like the CD would have been mastered from a heavily decomposing LP. Actually Drip Drip is barely listenable because of that. I have bootlegs sounding better than that!
The rest of the album sounds good, though I'm starting to wonder if I should have got Song to Comus compilation instead.

As mentionned on the back cover of my CD, Breathless is a joint release of Santuary and Abraxas/Get Back records. I tried contacting the company through the Abraxas website, but it's actually down. So I tried contacting Sanctuary, but so far no response. Have I bought a brand new coaster?

Anyone bought that specific edition of the album? If not what edition do you have?
Does anyone have other CDs from Breathless? What do they sound like, quality wise?

Anyway if you planned to buy First Utterance, better shell extra $$$ for other editions than buying this crappy re-issue. I was wondering if I should've started a new thread about it, but since there was already a thread about Comus, I posted it here.