I thought about using the William S. Burroughs cut and paste method with the press kit Sub Pop sent with the Comets On Fire release since the term "heavy metal" was used in one of the junkie bard's books once - I forget which one since their paranoiac drug fantasies all tend to run together - but cutting and pasting might be more labor than I'm accustomed to undertake, besides this might be my last review ever for it appears my ears have permanently sealed themselves shut due to the strain of listening to an entire album by The Album Leaf.

This was to have been a simple assignment: just compare and contrast the heaviest Sub Pop artist, Comets On Fire who (and I quote verbatim from the press release) "dealt in pure bombast, attack, overwhelming distortion and chaos, and yet possessing a shameless love for anthemic choruses, shattering hooks and rifs, and the smoke and magic of yesteryear's rock and roll iconoclasts", with the lightest, The Album Leaf who appear to be the Icelandic antidote to No Doz. The dirty hippie rock of Comets On Fire came bellowing out of my stereo speakers with what I thought was a field recording of an African elephant charge and I will admit that what few atoms of gray matter I have left remembered back to those lost years of my twenties which I spent peddling broken shard feedback frenzied rawk and roll and I could truly appreciate the stroboscopic wall of density being heralded by this elephantine stampeding opener, "The Bee And The Cracking Egg", and its pulsating punishment of sound. The rest of the disc, with the exception of the bizarro world jazz of "Pussy Foot The Duke", invokes a reptilian heaviness as capable of smashing Japanes buildings as well as song structures. I thought hippies were raised on granola, lentils, and the platitudes of love and togetherness, but these guys must have been spoonfed Blue Cheer and side two of the Stooges "Funhouse" record for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Blue Cathedral is some boffo skronk, some of the best I've heard since the days when Sir Lord Baltimore used to prowl the earth with their amplifier eyes leaving razed monitors and smoldering cities in their touring wake.