Search - Comsat Angels :: Land

Fabulous band falters

Stephen Saunders | O'CONNOR, ACT Australia | 02/16/2001

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This pleasant album is just about the only one from the Comsats long career (circa 1978-95) which is not an essential item in the thinking person's rock collection. When they came to do Land in 1983, Steve Fellows' band was dismayed by tour hiccups (the US Communication Satellite company had stymied a critical US tour)and the relative commercial failure of their first three albums of 1980-82. The album was undermined by overzealous efforts to find a commercial sound. Mike Howlett's slavish 1980s-pop style production stripped away the doom-steady brilliance of Fellows' compositions. Lost were the waspish guitar and keyboard atmospherics which had distinguished Fiction, the peak of Comsats' early period. The better moments are a rerun of their first indie hit, Independence Day, and the plaintive strains of I Know that Feeling. Improbably, the finest English band of the 1980s bounced back with two great albums of the 1990s, My Mind's Eye and The Glamour. Get these at all costs. Or, failing that, you can find a kind of poor man's Comsat Angels on the early U-2 albums. Fellows, something of a shadowy eminence in his home city of Sheffield, has been known to cauterise his Comsats period as one of "failure, depression and poverty". The good news is that, spurred by his production successes with Gomez, he has climbed out of the well and written more songs. If previous track form counts for anything, there will be a few classics among them."