Comus

condition (record/cover): VG+ (light surface noise throughout created by PVC outgassing) / VG+ (tag residue on front and light ring wear)

The original 1971 First Utterance on Dawn (DNLS 3019) is one of the most singular and disturbing records the British underground produced. Comus were five musicians clustered around Roger Wootton (vocals, acoustic guitar, ballpoint-pen sleeve drawings) and Glenn Goring (guitars, centerfold painting), with Bobbie Watson's vocal counterweight, Andy Hellaby on bass and Colin Pearson on violin. The surface is acoustic, all hand-played strings and voices, but the songs are pagan, bleak and frequently violent: "Diana" is told from the point of view of a rapist; "Drip Drip" is necrophilic; "The Prisoner" describes electroconvulsive therapy from inside the chair. Even half a century on it remains genuinely difficult to sit through, and absolutely impossible to mistake for anyone else.

The musical vocabulary is a strange convergence of British psychedelic folk (think Incredible String Band but driven by malevolence rather than wonder), early Pentangle intricacy and a kind of theatre-music violence that anticipates Current 93's later occupation of the same territory. Opeth, Jarboe and many of the doom-folk and dark-folk artists since have cited it as early.

The pressing on offer is the unofficial Yugoslav-style edition issued under the imprint "Beogradsko Proleće 1962" (catalog Nr. 42513), one of the shadow pressings that surfaced in collectors' circles after the album had become legendary and original Dawn copies had moved out of reach. Sleeve and labels reproduce the original artwork. The music remains what it always was: one of the genuinely extreme records of the 1970s.