Comets on Fire
Practical Transcendence
Published by Under The Radar

“I’m not sure any of us would be super heartbroken if they lost their job,” says Comets on Fire frontman Ethan Miller, “but nobody wants their family to break apart because they were off on the road gettin’ wasted and fuckin’ playin’ on some dirty stage somewhere. It’s not us.”

Psychedelic rock. There’s no better place for hearing the music and assigning like qualities to the musicians. Maybe it’s the poster art and the Acid Tests, the far-out wordplay and the nostalgia industry. There must be a certain kind of person behind these transporting sounds—you know, the fringe-dwelling mystic you never quite think of as someone who balances a checkbook. With long hair and a bushy beard, Ethan Miller looks the part, but his friendly straight shooting and pragmatic bent would be at home in any number of professions.

The singer/guitarist is on his third pot of coffee when I call him at 11am. He’s at home in Oakland, California, getting ready to rehearse for a tour with his other band, Howlin Rain, whose self-titled debut just hit the shelves—a little more than two months in advance of the fourth Comets studio album, Avatar.

This latest might be Comets’ best yet. For a band well known for hard hits and free-spiraling work on guitar, organ and Echoplex, it doesn’t come up short. It’s cleaner sounding, and in places noticeably more soulful. With more earth and only slightly less sky than 2004’s Blue Cathedral, it brushes now and then with the porch stomp of Howlin Rain.

How much does Miller think his other band rubbed off on Comets?

“It didn’t affect all that much, I don’t think, except maybe getting to work on vocals in a way that wasn’t like the really distorted, wild, crazy Echoplex vocal stuff. When I worked on the Comets records before this, I’d work hard at writing the lyrics and work hard on singing ’em, but only to a certain point, because I knew they were gonna go through the whole thing and get all fucked up and crazy. So for my part, the actual music writing went a lot different, because I try to write drastically differently for Comets than I do for Howlin Rain. But the vocal stuff, definitely, I wanted to take that a step further with Comets.”

Avatar has the free-form quality of past efforts, but the improvising was done prior to the studio sessions at Northern California’s Prairie Sun Studios, notable for hosting Tom Waits’ Bone Machine. “We really rehearsed this record down to the T,” says Miller. “When we got in there we tried not to settle for any takes. We tried to really just hammer ’em out and get ’em perfect, so to speak, without killin’ ’em or whatever. Which was new to us. Most people usually function that way in the studio; they usually rehearse. We’ve always kinda tried to leave a lot of room for the birth of ideas and the event of creation to happen inside the studio and hopefully get somethin’ caught on tape in its natural birth, rather than it being forced out. But this time we felt like, well, if we wanna keep makin’ records that are different from each other, then maybe we need to try different techniques.”

Keeping it fresh is partly about making something of value to the end user, according to Miller. Drawing on my own set of psych-rock notions, I ask him about the spiritual side of his music. He offers something in the line of customer satisfaction.

“I think that we don’t consciously try to construct the albums as a spiritual endeavor, necessarily, or as a mini spiritual practice. But I would hope that our finest moments—for some people that really get into it—would take ’em to a moment of transcendence of some sort. On one hand I would like to think that Comets on Fire music can function as something that is pleasurable for people to listen to, where it’s not too heady that people can’t just come home on a Friday night and drink a beer and go, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna throw this record on and just hang out for a few and have a good time.’ I would hope that our records can function on that level, but on the other hand we try to produce art in our albums to some degree as well. Comets are not solely an artistic endeavor for ourselves, to make ourselves feel like, ‘fuck, I’m exorcising my demons’ or something like that.”

Comets guitarist and Six Organs of Admittance principal Ben Chasny, whom I reached separately by email, doesn’t fully agree. “I don’t care if people like the records or not,” he says. “I happen to be in a very fortunate situation where people happen to be interested in the sounds that I want to make. This might change in a second, in a day. Who knows? But I am not going to change the music that I make so that people can enjoy it.”

The Comets recently got back from playing the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in East Sussex, England, an experience that Miller enjoyed for the beer-drinking campfire camaraderie that was a result of all the bands staying on site. He’s a natural comrade; he clearly likes the beer drinking, and that’s about as crazy as he and his bandmates get.

But psychedelic music would seem to involve psychedelics, right?

“Not really, no,” says Miller. “I don’t think any of the Comets guys do anything from using psychedelics or even try to draw back on our psychedelic experiences to the point that’s like, ‘Yeah, I remember that acid trip I took when I was in high school and I wanna see if I can get somethin’ that feels like that shit goin’ on.’ It just doesn’t have anything to do with us, to be honest.”

Is it that it’s not productive?

“I don’t know if it’s productive or not, ’cause we never tried to write on acid or mushrooms or anything. As much as I may or may not let certain people down that have a certain idea about us, it’s absolutely false. And I’m not denying it because I don’t want someone to know that I’ve eaten mushrooms or something. I think it’s just a thing that got sort of built up. You know, I guess the way that if Motorhead didn’t actually do speed, you’d probably still wanna believe that they did [laughs], ’cause it sure seems like they do. For us, sadly, it’s much more beer drinkin’ and maybe a shot of whiskey or somethin’ like that.”

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