The Comet Is Coming - Channel The Spirits (2019 UK Leaf Vinyl LP Repress)

The Comet Is Coming's debut album Channel The Spirits announced the arrival of one of the UK's most thrilling and uncompromising new groups. Released originally in 2016 and repressed in April 2019 on the Leaf label, this album captures saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, keyboardist Danalogue (Dan Leavers), and drummer Betamax (Maxwell Hallett) creating cosmic, apocalyptic jazz that draws equally from Sun Ra's interstellar explorations, punk's raw energy, and electronic music's textural possibilities. The result is music that honours jazz tradition while sounding utterly contemporary and unhinged, propulsive and psychedelic in equal measure.

The album opens with "The Prophecy", immediately establishing the group's cosmic narrative framework. Throughout Channel The Spirits, track titles reference space travel, cosmic phenomena, and apocalyptic scenarios, creating a loose conceptual thread about humanity's relationship to the cosmos and our planet's precarious future. "Space Carnival" delivers exactly what its title promises: a whirling, dizzying journey through weightless sound, Hutchings' saxophone alternately screaming and singing over Danalogue's swirling synthesizers and Betamax's relentless drumming.

"Journey Through The Asteroid Belt" and "Nano" demonstrate the group's gift for creating tracks that function both as extended improvisations and as tightly focused compositions. The production, handled by the group members themselves, maintains rawness and immediacy while achieving sonic clarity. This isn't smooth, polished jazz but something more urgent and confrontational.

"New Age" offers brief respite before "Slam Dunk In A Black Hole" lives up to its wonderfully absurd title with one of the album's most intense moments. Side one's cosmic journey sets up the album's second half as an exploration of deep space and existential confrontation.

Side two opens with "Cosmic Dust", a moment of relative calm before "Star Furnace" explodes with white-hot intensity. The title track "Channel The Spirits" sits at the album's heart, suggesting that the group's music functions as spiritual practice, invoking forces beyond the rational and corporeal. This connection to spiritual jazz pioneers like Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra is explicit, though The Comet Is Coming updates that tradition with electronic textures and contemporary production aesthetics.

"Deep Within The Engine Deck" and "Lightyears" maintain the album's momentum before "End Of Earth" closes with apocalyptic grandeur. Throughout, Hutchings' saxophone ranges from tender melodicism to violent screaming, his technique encompassing bebop fluency, free jazz intensity, and contemporary extended techniques. Danalogue's synthesisers create everything from cosmic ambience to grinding industrial noise, while Betamax's drumming bridges jazz tradition and electronic music's insistent pulse.

The 12 tracks function both as individual statements and as a continuous journey, the album rewarding both careful track-by-track listening and immersive front-to-back experience. The group's live performances, which gained them a fervent following in London's jazz clubs and eventually worldwide, are characterised by intense volume, visual spectacle, and communal energy that recordings can only partially capture, but Channel The Spirits successfully translates their vision to recorded format.

This 2019 repress on Leaf, the label that originally released the album, makes this important debut available to the audience The Comet Is Coming built through subsequent releases and Hutchings' work with Sons of Kemet and other projects. The UK pressing maintains the original package design, likely including the album's distinctive cosmic artwork that visually represents the music's otherworldly ambitions.