Comus First Utterance

Comus' first album contains an imaginative if elusive brand of experimental folk-rock, with a tense and sometimes distressed vibe. At times, this straddles the border between folk-rock and the kind of songs you'd expect to be sung at a witches' brew fest, the haunting supernatural atmosphere enhanced by bursts of what sound like a theramin-like violin, hand drums, flute, oboe, ghostly female backup vocals, and detours into almost tribal rhythms.

As this expansive (though not entirely as "complete" as promised) anthology reminds us, Comus' frightening musical visions surely represented the darkest side of England's late-'60s folk-rock movement. Like a Fairport Convention from Hell, the group pushed folk boundaries into alien progressive, psychedelic, and acid rock realms, capping it with desperate and macabre subject matter and warping all the genres involved (and numerous minds) in the process. 1971's disorienting, often terrifying debut, First Utterance, could have doubled as (and may have well inspired, in part) the soundtrack to Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man a few years later, given its recurring pagan themes and varied blend of voices (some male, some female, some…?) and instrumentation (flute, oboe, strings, etc.).

Forty-two years. That's how long it has taken Comus to follow up their long legendary First Utterance debut, and you cannot even ask if the wait was worthwhile. A less than stellar second album, back in 1974, followed by a 35-year silence essentially rendered the hiatus redundant, and falling into Out of the Coma today is akin to rediscovering a priceless manuscript that should have been in our hands decades back. Yes, priceless. No matter that the album features just three new songs (all of them familiar from the band's current live show); no matter, either, that the rest of the disc is consumed by "Malgaard Suite," a rough live sketch of a song that would have made the next album, had the original band only stayed the course…