Little Comets – In Search of Elusive Little Comets

It’s much easier to attack Little Comets for whom they want to be rather than who they are. As the grizzled, mid-decade UK-indie clock-punchers studiously arrive with 5th or 6th efforts (with both critical and commercial attention waning and the aughties slowly turning into the tweenies,) the world waited patiently for a new generation of sprightly Lit-majors to capture and elaborate on the momentum that made Britain such a fertile ground for pop-palatable indie.

What we got was a Libertines reunion and a Kele solo album.

Yes, now in 2011 the glossy, scintillating textures of those bands - Kaiser Chiefs, The Futureheads, Maximo Park – sound unmistakably of a time and place, probably fit for a spurred-up revival ten years from now. The trademark, overarching, slick-as-hell sound the scene produced has been approached from so many perspectives; it’s hard to resist exasperation when a beaming guitar line buzzes past your ears. So in that sense Little Comets deserve credit for having the balls to sound just like 2005 with the fleet-hearted enthusiasm that they do. Knowing this level of redundancy is a surefire critical kiss-off, they wear their influences with pride, and embrace the swallowing clichés with straight-faced vigor.

Little Comets at least sound more fresh-faced and energetic than the contemporaries they’ll inevitably be tied to, and most of that can easily be attributed to their greenness. The spastic, scrambled muscle put on display on their debut In Search of… initially blasts away the familiarity of the music. The songs create a manic, danceable environment – fronted by a deliberate guitar stomp and punctuated by Mark Harle’s surgical drumming. Robert Cole sings in a measured, over-enunciated shout, giving his B-level couplets and added sense of percussion. The studio-induced flourishes are slim, letting Little Comets focus on being a rock band – squeezing memorable hooks out of their respective instruments. The compositions override and crash into one another, scribbling far outside the lines, only to be tugged back by Harle’s metamorphic beatmaking. Little Comets are certainly one of the more musically academic bands from the isles, but that never gets in the way of their joyous, irreverent charms. One of the deeper cuts is entitled ‘Dancing Song’ and is just as self-aware as you’d expect it to be.

There is one fairly egregious moment on the closer ‘Intelligent Animals’ – the song starts as a ruminating, piano-led ballad, cryptically touching on the savageness of humanity, only to tip their hands entirely halfway through with a brazen-faced sampling of a Darfurian speaker dissecting the problems his homeland has. While probably born out of the best of intentions, it takes a song that could’ve been about universal plight, and locates it to one specific region and one specific cause. Already an awkwardly solemn period on a peppy listen, the topical call-to-arms makes for a strangely souring ending.

Besides that, Little Comets specialize in merriment, even the slower songs ‘Her Black Eyes,’ ‘Isles,’ and ‘Intelligent Animals’ are brushed with a loose sing-along component, but that’s about the limit to the band’s sprawl. They don’t pretend to be anything denser than a boisterous bunch of college-age indie kids, and that makes In Search of… a breezy listen at best. The music has been polished to a mirror shine, but intrinsically held back for the thoroughly trampled sound they’re entirely indebted to. In another epoch Little Comets could be cresting a wave of hype, in 2011 they aren’t so lucky.