Search - Comsat Angels :: Sleep No More (Dig)

If I Could Only Give 6 Stars

Jay P. Francis | Houston, Texas United States | 07/08/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Sleep No More is truly truly one of the great albums of all time that no one knows about. Granted, it is now two decades plus since it came out so it will feel a little dated, but....not as much as you would guess. This was an exceptional, amazing album."

A Brilliant Album, Lost No More

L. Mitchell | Brooklyn, NY, USA | 10/10/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Thanks to this 2006 re-release, we've been given a chance to rediscover a classic album by the great underrated band, Comsat Angels. Many have described the music here as gloomy, but don't get the idea that this is the "shoegazer" sound of bands that came later. There is a power to many of the tracks, such as The Eye Dance, Dark Parade and Be Brave. It has been said the drums were moved next to the elevator shaft and recorded from several floors, creating a dynamic beat--such is the craft this band put into their music. The original album included 10 songs; this re-release has several bonus tracks, including Eye Of The Lens, one of the Comsats' greatest songs. Renascent has packaged the CD with a fine booklet including photos, album synoposis and quotes by Stephen Fellows, the Comsats' front man. With music this good, everyone should have this album in their collection (and on their iPod) now that it's lost no more."

A somewhat one-sided goth album, with good bonus tracks

Angry Mofo | 03/22/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The second album by The Comsat Angels sounds a lot more professional than the first one. Sleep No More focuses on guitar and bass, and the awkward pounding rhythms from the first album are replaced by more subtle percussion. Many songs have actual discernible bass lines. The production is also much better. Stephen Fellows' voice sounds stronger and more authoritative, maybe because he became a better singer by this point, or maybe because the echoing production makes his voice sound deeper. The liner notes show that the band was experimenting with Martin-Hannett-style recording techniques (e.g. recording from the bottom of an elevator shaft), though they don't explicitly cite Hannett as an influence.



The first two songs show energy and atmosphere that were generally absent from Waiting For A Miracle. "Eye Dance" has an aggressive, droning guitar line and a booming chorus showcasing Fellows' newfound voice. The song is similar to "Independence Day" from the first album in the way it uses pauses in the guitar line for dramatic effect, but hey, there's nothing wrong with relying on one's strengths. And "Sleep No More" is the best slow song the band ever wrote. The music consists of many layered keyboards with a muffled beat in the background. There are no distinct hooks. The keyboards form a foggy, ethereal blur, but this happens to reflect the mood described in the lyric, which seems to be about how Fellows and his probably-female friend feel lost without purpose in a city. The song is moving because Fellows adopts the more down-to-earth persona that he showed in the best songs on Waiting For A Miracle. In this song, he's just a young man who is "sure there must be somewhere we can go," though the song's slow pace and the faraway echo on his voice appear to indicate otherwise.



Unfortunately, Fellows is in full rock-poet mode for the rest of the album. Sleep No More is very much in line with the goth rock movement that was emerging at the time. It's full of slow tempos, droning guitar lines, echoing drums, and vaguely unhappy sentiments like "it won't mean anything," "it was going to take so long, but it has almost gone," "it's so funny but I'm not laughing," and so on. What "it" is, we can only guess. There's just nothing to catch hold of in these songs. The liner notes claim that the album is a powerful emotional experience, but actually the album conveys no concrete emotions. Maybe you just need to be in a certain state of mind to appreciate it. Or maybe there was some kind of general mood at the time that got lost over the past twenty years.



But the music is just as vague as the lyrics. The album's focus on guitar and bass reveals just how few memorable guitar hooks there are. The second half of the album is particularly lacking. Songs like "Diagram" and "Light Years" just don't stand out very much, whereas "Goat Of The West" and "Restless" basically repeat "Eye Dance" and "Sleep No More" in style. Not to say there are no good parts, though -- "Our Secret" has some guitar texture in the verses, unlike many of the other songs, and "Dark Parade," though monotonous for most of its duration, ends with a completely unexpected, rousing crescendo.



There are eight bonus tracks at the end, like on the reissue of Waiting For A Miracle, and they actually improve the album a lot, again like the bonus tracks for the first album. "Eye Of The Lens" is an excellent single. The lyrics are more detailed than on almost all of the songs on the album itself, the fast pace adds some much-needed variation, and there's even a cool Bernard-Sumner-style drone-guitar solo at the end. "Another World" is a slow song, but here again there's evidence that the band was trying to experiment with more different styles than the album might suggest. There's a brief piano solo and, strangely enough, a little recurring keyboard rhythm that almost sounds like reggae. Maybe they should have just gone ahead and made a straight-up reggae song. The last two bonus tracks are closer to Waiting For A Miracle in style. Like most of the songs on that album, they rely mostly on the accumulation of loud drums backed by keyboards. "Mass," the one previously unreleased out-take, was later reworked into a B-side around the time of the band's third album. The later version is much less aggressive, though, and the out-take presented here has a satisfying strength in its rhythm section. The four demos, however, are all fairly boring. Mostly they just closely follow the final versions, though the alternate take of "Goat Of The West" has slightly different lyrics.



To summarize, Sleep No More sounds better than Waiting For A Miracle, but it lacks the vulnerable charm of the debut and doesn't have enough great musical ideas to compensate. Many of the songs tend to blend together and sound monotonous. If you're putting together a collection of goth rock, this album might be worth a look, but Waiting For A Miracle is in some sense more interesting, and the next album, Fiction, is a lot more fun."