The Comet is Coming

When The Comet Is Coming rocked theHaus in Ludwigshafen for the first time in early November 2016, the concert announcement in the program booklet was still about Shabaka Hutchings. At that time, he had established himself as the busy asset of a vital and experimental, but at the same time very popular London scene, which sent interesting to rousing acts across the channel by the dozen, as if to prove that jazz can be quite club-ready and need not be academically anemic. With Sons of Kemet, Shabaka & The Ancestors and The Comet Is Coming, Hutchings has several outfits at the start, but with quite alternative concepts. The founding myth of The Comet Is Coming goes back to 2013: back then, the electro duo Soccer 96 - keyboardist Dan Leavers and drummer Maxwell Hallett - wowed the relevant club scene with a highly reduced but highly energetic form of jazz rock. Gladly in the audience, sometimes immediately with saxophone - Shabaka, ready to jump in immediately. Soccer 96 invited and, according to their own statement, were overrun by a wave of energy. The superstructure of The Comet Is Coming was quickly a wild mix of B-movie dystopia, space-diaspora utopia a la Sun Ra, Erich von Däniken spökenkiekerei and techno-cyborg interfaces. The band name then owes itself consistently to Nostradamus. Musically, the mixture of funk, dub, grime and spiritual jazz fervor points to the Last Dance in the disco apocalypse anyway. The doom is coming, but until then party is made. Three albums went the bill, then came the pandemic, the war, the climate. Now we want to know where the journey goes. The new, fourth album with the beautiful title "Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam", which could have come from Mr. Spock, is scheduled for release at the end of September. The first single "Lucid Dreamer" is promising and just three and a half minutes long. I wonder if that means something. Meanwhile, first reviews of the new album make use of terms like "doomier", "dystopian unease", "a tangible sense of anxiety" and "brute force" (WIRE). So: music, suitable for the time.