Dragging The Past For Pearls (II)

The Comsat Angels - My Mind's Eye (1993)

To surmise: The Comsat Angels were a Sheffield post-punk band who started out by releasing three wonderful albums in the early 80s. Then they tried to see if they could make the 'pop' angle work, an ill-advised move that did them no favours and saw them, by the end of the decade, resorting to changing their name to Dream Command in a final move at commercial viability.

By 1993, most people may have assumed the band had split up years prior. Instead, they came out with My Mind's Eye, an album that easily ranks with their best. Indeed, from the off, with Driving, the band come across as determined to get back to the heights they hit in the early 80s after years in the wilderness.

What the Comsat Angels always had going for them was a superbly solid rhythm section in bassist Kevin Bacon and drummer Mik Glaisher. Their tautness allowed keys player Andy Peake and singer/guitarist Stephen Fellows to go off on whatever tangents they fancied.

Throughout this album, what does come across is how it emphasises how good the Comsats were as songwriters. Even at their most mainstream, on 7 Day Weekend, songs like You Move Me and I'm Falling were as good as anything in the charts, albeit they now sound a bit dated. By 1993, they'd honed down their chops to create a set with more timeless qualities: songs like Field Of Tall Flowers and And All The Stars don't sound dated at all and the title track showed they could amp it up in style when they needed to.

Sadly, despite getting the best press notices of their career, My Mind's Eye didn't change the band's luck on the sales front. Kevin Bacon left soon after for a successful production career and the band replaced him and added a second guitarist for the subsequent The Glamour album. By the mid 90s, they'd finally handed their cards in.

When the band, in it's original line up, did reform in 2009, they focused entirely on material from the first three albums. I hope in any subsequent gigs, they expand their set to include songs from both of their 90s albums. Reissued in 2007 with plenty of remixes and b-sides, My Mind's Eye deserves to be recognised in the same league as Waiting For A Miracle, Sleep No More and Fiction as showing the very best of a very exceptional band.