Ladies and gentlemen…The Comateens.

February 14th, 2007

Long, long ago…in a half-forgotten, yet Totally Bitchin’, era known as The 1980s, a revolution of sorts occurred in popular music. The previous decade had seen an incredible flowering of new forms/styles/genres of music: dancefloors were ruled by the bootylicious energy of funk and disco; lovers pawed each other up to the soft sounds of The Carpenters and Engelbert Humperdinck; disillusioned youth slamdanced to the raucous caterwauling of punk; prog-rock wreathed the world in cannabinol-scented myths and symphonic influences; and, slowly but surely, synthesized sounds tweaked from the be-knobbed and be-cabled guts of analog machines began to coalesce as a distinct presence in music. From that seething mulch of influences, New Wave music germinated in the late 1970s and blossomed in the first years of the 1980s.

Mainly thanks to this extremely diverse background, New Wave music is incredibly hard to define–to pin down beneath a specific constellation of words that can be used to specify exactly what music is and is not “New Wave.” Was it just a more radio-friendly form of punk rock or an umbrella term that included everything from jangly retro-pop to <em>eiskalt</em> Kraftwerkian synthpop? Was it “any band, with attitude, that did not embrace the simplistic, loud-fast playing style, whether that meant that their sound was reggae, ska, or experimental”? Hell, was there “no such thing as New Wave” in the first place?!

Don’t look at me for answers, people–I’m not about to waste your time playing taxonomic games here. One thing’s for sure: definitions be damned, because you know New Wave music when you hear it, don’t you?! Whether you’re listening to The Police, The Boomtown Rats, The B-52s, Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Madness, Weird Al Yankovic, Duran Duran, Industry, Josef K, A Flock of Seagulls, Depeche Mode, The Stranglers, Blondie, The Clash…or, for that matter, The Killers, The Bravery, Arcade Fire, Whitest Boy Alive, The Departure, The Faint, The Rapture, whatever–you’re listening to New Wave music and you just know it.

Because New Wave is not something that can be easily delineated within the proximal logic of words: it is a unique sound, a spirit, a quality of “being different” from the mainstream that applies to ska just as it applies to synthpop. Hell, even when New Wave music became the mainstream throughout most of the early ’80s, with acts Duran Duran and ABC and Depeche Mode routinely making Top 40 hits, there was still an edgy, outre quality to New Wave music that made you feel as though you were listening to something from a parallel universe where skinny ties and slicked-back hair, neon socks and plaid jackets were the norm and music was a never-ending adventure. It was complex even when it was simple. It was truly Something Else.

And no band captured that essence better than The Comateens.

…Whoah. W-w-What?! You never heard of the Comateens?!

What ~~rock~~ ~~mountain~~ continental shelf have you been living under?

Well…if you’re a youngling perhaps born during (or, *nudge nudge wink wink*, as a result of) the New Wave years, then perhaps you have a good reason to have never heard of The Comateens. Otherwise, you have no excuse. Or, well…maybe. Anyway–

I first encountered the Comateens at the tender, easily-influenced age of seven or eight when, one night while I was up coughing myself silly with the flu, I turned on that newfangled “MTV” channel and–KAPOW!–the video for “The Late Mistake” hit me. The driving beat, the buzzy analog synth lead, the funky guitars and the lush vocal harmonies shot right into my body and lit up that fanciful organ known as the Funk Bone, and there I was, covered in mucous but shaking my third-grade butt to the late-night beat. I later came upon the video for “Resist Her” and was, of course, hooked. But then, like any backwoods youth with cable and MTV but not a single decent record store in sight to furnish me with actual copies of the band’s albums, I forgot about them as my senses were assailed by Thomas Dolby, Gary Numan, Duran Duran, Talking Heads, and all the thousands of other childhood favorites whose music to this day enlivens my every waking hour.

Yeeeaaaaaars later, I rediscovered the Comateens through a strange, oblique source: Beavis and Butt-Head. The video for “The Late Mistake” showed up briefly on one episode of that show, and the floodgates of addiction were released in my mind. “Hey, I remember this song!” I thought. “It was my favorite when I was, like, a kid n’ shit.” I went looking for the Comateens on the Internets but, alas, discovered nothing. No CDs available on Amazon.com. No websites. Oh, wait…a busted-up “acceptable” copy of a vinyl CD on GEMM…but that was it.

Fortunately, I had just gotten into using a certain program called Napster at this time as well, so…what they hey, I figured, maybe someone Out There in Computerland had an mp3 of this song. Hot damn, there it was! I downloaded a copy of “The Late Mistake” (ripped from a New Wave comp I’d never even heard of) and had it blasting from my speakers for the next six months. But I could find no other tracks by them. I knew they did more–I had to have them! I soon discovered an incredible, and now sadly defunct (thanks to those cocksuckers, the RIAA), website called Audiogalaxy which–wonder of wonders! miracle of miracles!–gave me access to a much wider selection of tracks by the Comateens: the lush groove of “Cold Eyes,” the club masterpieces “Get Off My Case” and “Don’t Come Back,” the funk-a-tastic “Ice Machine” and the 100% Pure, Uncut, Colombian New Wave weirdness of “Pictures On a String.”

Amazing!

They were simply the best New Wave band ever….

But they’re also one of the hardest to track down. Unfortunately, you see, the New York City-based Comateens were never as wildly and widely popular as, say, Talking Heads. One could almost say they were “obscure”–though they did have a pretty big club hit with their Completely Awesome single “Get Off My Case” in 1983. The great tragedy of the Comateens is that very little of their stuff has ever been released on CD. You can still find their cover of the theme song from The Munsters here and there, and if you’re lucky you might discover “The Late Mistake” lurking on a few New Wave comps…but, other than that, you’re prettymuch S.O.L.,

Of course, one can find virtually all of their vinyl record releases on eBay. EPs, singles, compilation appearances…they’re all still available–and many of them are in very good shape. I own virtually everything the band put out with the exception of one or two split singles, and many times over the years I’ve considered digitizing the vinyl to mp3 on my computer in order to do a little remastering here and there and have my own space-age versions of the Comateens’ jams to blast here at HPL Labs and in my car. But, man…digitizing vinyl is a lot of work–and I’ve just never got around to it. You can still find mp3s by them here and there via SoulSeek and other P2P apps, as well, but they’re few and far between these days….

So I’ve been wishing, over the years, that someone somewhere would get the idea to pick up the Comateens back-catalogue and release it all on shiny, hi-fi CD.

Well, guess what? Someone did. And it’s the band themselves!

That’s right, peeps–Nic North and Lyn Byrd have not only set up the above-linked Comateens website, they are also working to get their legendary funk-a-licious jams remastered and rereleased on CD!

The Comateens are coming out of retirement in a big way, with a MySpace page that features a number of their songs, the aforementioned website showcasing their history–and offering an awesome CafePress link to purchase Comateens t-shirts, mugs, mousepads, burial shrouds, you-name-it–and soon enough, CDs. Thanks to Tha Intarwebs, not only will oldskool fans such as myself be able to interact with and rediscover the band we’ve loved since the early days of the New Wave, but a whole new generation of rockamarollers, indie-rock chilluns whose tastes are being led back into the ’80s via the current spate of New New Wave bands, will be able to discover this amazing band.

So here’s what you do, folks. Check ‘em out on MySpace. Friend them. Tell your friends to friend them. Visit their website and check out their wicked-cool timeline, CafePress shop, download a few mp3s (definitely check out “Winter”–it is a stone-cold jam) and, hey, send ‘em an email to tell them you’re Out There and that you appreciate them! If you’re a longtime fan and have some Comateens memorabilia, scan it and send it to them–they’re working hard to assemble as much of their history online as they can, and you can help!

I’ve just used more exclamation points in this article than I ever have before.

But that’s okay, because The Comateens are back!!!