For a couple years in the early 1990s, Come was the best band playing in the space at which punk, indie and rock’n’roll converged. The “rock’n’roll” was especially prevalent in the band’s singular sound; Thalia Zedek, Chris Brokaw and their bandmates managed to evoke the most dissipated tonalities of the Classic Rock Canon (the Stones’ French Riviera sojourn, Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night-period tours with the Santa Monica Flyers) and carry them forward into the early 1990s, creating a ragged splendor that was distinctly Come’s own. They wrote and recorded two brilliant records, 11:11 (1992) and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (1994), full of terrific songs and a palpably desperate atmosphere. But the songs really took off in their live renditions, in which all…
…the sweat and groggy glory could dazzle, collapse and gather itself for another ascent.
So, it’s decidedly welcome that Come’s two performances on John Peel’s radio show, from 1992 and 1993, have been gathered on this new Peel Sessions release. You get the best of two worlds: a studio-engineered, sonically clear experience you can listen to again and again (if, like this reviewer, you are inclined to do so, repeatedly), and Come doing its grand and simultaneously down-at-the-heels thing, with the raw intensity of real-time performance. The 1993 set has some great moments: versions of “Sharon vs Karen” (a track from the 1994 7” for “Wrong Side”) and “City of Fun” (a cover of the song by the Only Ones, first available on Rob Deacon’s Volume Eight compilation). They’re not widely available tunes, and they both tear the place to pieces.
But the 1992 session, comprising four songs from 11:11, is the real scorcher. Listeners possessing note-for-note recall of that record will be transported, especially by the performances of “Bell” and “Off to One Side.” The LP versions of those songs are marked by a warped disorientation, a tendency to slide in and out of time and rhythm that complements the doom struck, nightmarish thematics. The band replicates those seemingly ineffable qualities with disarming immediacy and faith to the studio recordings. But none of it feels canned, or overly practiced. The tunes are too good, the playing too forcefully real.
Songs that weird and discomfitingly intimate were never going to be hits — but even among music geeks that like to talk about the ebbs and flows of rock’s long narrative, Come flies under the radar. In conversations about the indie rock moment, the Elephant 6 bands’ Beatles obsessions have been widely anatomized, and those much-praised GBV records of the mid-1990s often sounded like expertly miniaturized versions of the Who’s performance at the Rock and Roll Circus. Come’s players weren’t paying tribute or recycling riffs; they were living and writing the songs they had to write. The band’s dissonant and emotionally piercing music was tuned in to a deeper flow of blues that courses through some of the hardest rock, and songs like “Dead Molly” and “William” sutured the early Clinton years to the long crisis of Nixon’s second term. They’re like a secret history of American socio-cultural brownouts. It’s great to hear some of those songs again, in all their gritty sublimity. — dusted