Just like all the misfits and strays Dave Christian corresponds with on Letters to Ordinary Outsiders, Comet Gain has – most likely by design – always had trouble fitting in. An ongoing U.K. art-pop concern since 1992, they’ve trafficked in everything from off-kilter post-punk and stylized New Wave to gritty R&B, garage-y psychedelia and whatever melodic mischief the C86 crowd was getting up to in its heyday.
Theirs has been an itinerant career, restlessly cycling through various lineup combinations and surfing different genres, rarely staying in one place too long. And so, Christian – known to many as David Feck or Charlie Damage – and company were never destined for mainstream acceptance, and that’s fine by them. They’d rather hang out with the Mods or the Creation Records crew anyway, although their latest LP of big-hearted, indie-pop sparkle and sweep could conceivably get them into the club. Based on the album’s great spirit alone, it would be unduly harsh to deny them entry. Hurray for the underdog!
“Can you see? She brought sunlight to the factory,” sings a wistful Christian, some three-quarters of the way through the yearning, romantic opener “The Ballad of the Lives We Led.” The muse for this rousing blue-collar anthem, the “heartbeat” of their otherwise drab 9-to-5 world, is a rare source of light, just like the theatrical, uplifting song itself. It could be a vignette from a workingman’s musical, but instead, it opens the door to even more life-affirming, ‘60s-inspired pop radiance, as the sunny horns, hazy organ swells and propulsive, golden strumming of a buoyant “If They Can’t Find the Way Then There’s No Way Out” lead a an uplifting and thoughtful search for meaning and self-discovery – everything in unison, everything polished to a nice shine.
Peppered with casual between-song dialogue, Letters to Ordinary Outsiders is a mass of appealing contradictions, the stomping, smoggy freakbeat of a relentlessly galvanizing, utterly ecstatic “Beat of the Veins” and the sneering, fashion-forward swing of “Threads” swaggering down Carnaby Street, while “Buildings” – wistfully sung by Rachel Evans – is a lovely ballad full of architectural nostalgia and familial longing that can’t go home again. Softer still, “We Were Paintermen” mixes the bleary-eyed, sentimental narrative of The Pogues with the twinkling, paisley charm of The Byrds.
What colors and drives the clean and aerodynamic Letters to Ordinary Outsiders, however, is its smart, straightforward songwriting and evocative, rags-to-rags lyrics, establishing a through line from The Kinks to Pulp, where literary flourishes and little details splash around in water main breaks of flowing guitar-pop glory, like those that occur in “Do You Remember ‘The Lites on the Water’” and “Hearts of Scars.” Cynicism may infect the title of a gently rippling and darkly aqueous “Yeah, I Know it’s a Wonderful Life, But There’s Always Further You Can Fall,” but it’s a moment of pessimism that passes quickly. For those living on the margins, it’s mail call.
