Comets on Fire, Avatar

This album should come with a sticker: “Only play loud.” Played in the background, Comets on Fire’s Avatar sounds like a melange of various psychedelic bands, with a potpourri of Blue Cheer, a sprinkling of 13th Floor Elevators, a trace of Grateful Dead, et cetera. Pleasant enough, and probably mind-blowing to the average psych fan, but not worth calling special attention to.

And I wrote a review to that point, but there’s so much hype around these guys that I wanted to be fair, so I gave it one more listen with the volume cranked, and about eight seconds in the sky split open and a supremely fucked free fall began. It’s with volume that the band’s idiosyncracies come out, the proof that Comets on Fire are unique and insane and not really concerned with listenability at times but nonetheless able to create an entrancing soundscape — moored on the shores of psychedelic rock, yes, but looking out to an alien land without borders. I won’t go so far as saying it’s a land everyone wants to visit — in fact, there are moments that are profoundly annoying — but Avatar is a record that anyone vaguely interested in this kind of music should try to engage seriously and wholeheartedly at least once, full-on. You still may not like the scenery, but you won’t forget it.