Underrated band ... With three major recording contracts and no hit singles, this expressive UK guitar band survived more than 15 years.
Erroneously regarded as a synth pop band - and, every now and then, as a band that peaked with a song placed in a scene of Real Genius - the Comsat Angels were one of the finest bands of the post-punk / new wave was.
Often as moody if less dramatic than Joy Division, their first and best albums - 1980's Waiting for a Miracle, 1981's Sleep No More, and 1982's Fiction - featured abstract pop songs with sparse instrumentation, many of which were bleak and filled with some form of heartache. The albums were almost unrelentingly sullen, but they were always transfixing. The band then fell prey to various commercial pressures for several years. In the '90s they resurfaced with a pair of powerful albums that resembled logical extensions of their earliest work, and then they vanished again.
After numerous incarnations and name changes, the Sheffield-based Radio Earth - guitarist and vocalist Stephen Fellows, drummer Mik Glaisher, keyboardist Andy Peake, bassist Kevin Bacon - found themselves opening for Pere Ubu in Newcastle.
After the gig, the quartet realized that they had been blown off the stage and intimidated by the headliners' sense of focus and ability to confuse. Following a rethink, they came back as the less self-conscious Comsat Angels (the name referenced a short story by J.G. Ballard).
They took a loan from Glaisher's father to record and release the Red Planet EP in 1979; BBC DJ John Peel, who was sent a copy, liked what he heard, requested a few more copies and booked the band for one of his famous Peel Sessions.
Sleep No More, the second Comsat Angels album, is a confident follow-up that contains a tighter and more cutting version of Waiting for a Miracle's alluring insularity. Going by "Eye Dance," the torrid opener, one might expect a more aggressive affair, but that's not necessarily the case.
The album turns out to be neither as pop nor as fast, with a majority of the material playing out at a dirge-like pace. There were no singles. Like Magazine's Secondhand Daylight, or the Sound's All Fall Down, Sleep No More can be a trudge and quite bleak, perhaps even impenetrable at times. However, as with Waiting for a Miracle, the dynamics of the album become increasingly perceptible with each play, and the slowest, austerest passages begin to seem as intense as the few that slam and punch
With the exception of "Restless," a mood piece of harmonic flickers, light whispers, and low throb, the album is driven by Mik Glaisher's booming drums, which were recorded in a manner - near a lift shaft, to be precise, with microphones placed on six surrounding floors - that makes the album wholly enveloping and, occasionally, imposing. (Imagine Joy Division's "I Remember Nothing" and Talking Heads' "The Overload" on top of one another, doubled in heaviness.)
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