First Utterance - Comus (1971)

Holy shit do I love weird music.

You’re just going about your day, doing normal boring things like stressing over what to talk to your therapist about later today, and this weird slab of outsider acid folk just jumps up in your path and says “your day is not going to go like you thought.”

(my therapist has since rescheduled, probably not because he hates my guts and thinks I’m a failure)

Sometimes things just force a different perspective on you, and you can’t help but to reevaluate what’s going on around you in new ways. Music as oracle; music as divination; music as welcome distraction.

This would be pretty standard British folk rock, but it goes off in about eight different directions at once. There are 12-minute epics that would fit on a prog record at the time. There’s creepy sounds sneaking under recognizable psych and folk tropes to make them way more disturbing that you’d think. There’s even some driving acoustic guitar that borders on hard rock.

Being something you’ve never heard before doesn’t automatically make a record good. But it’s a great feeling to me when I stumble across something that really puts my day on a different track.

Tracks I Liked

Drip Drip - borderline neurotic but still weirdly compelling

Song To Comus - The band’s namesake was a character of late Greek mythology whose big break was a starring role in a John Milton play in the 17th century.