vinylfanatics.com

**The Comsat Angels - Waiting For A Miracle**
★★★★☆

By 1980, the post-punk landscape was fragmenting into a thousand different directions, each more angular and experimental than the last. While their contemporaries were busy deconstructing rock music with wire cutters and sledgehammers, Sheffield's The Comsat Angels were quietly perfecting something altogether more atmospheric and haunting. Their debut album, *Waiting For A Miracle*, emerged from the industrial gloom of South Yorkshire like a transmission from some distant, melancholic planet.

The origins of this remarkable record can be traced back to the band's formation in 1978, when Stephen Fellows (vocals, guitar), Andy Peake (keyboards), Simon Anderson (bass), and Mick Glaisher (drums) began crafting their distinctive brand of glacial post-punk in the shadow of Sheffield's steel mills. Unlike the jagged urgency of their punk predecessors, The Comsat Angels were more interested in space – both literal and metaphorical. They drew inspiration from science fiction, cosmic isolation, and the peculiar loneliness of modern urban life, themes that would permeate every groove of their debut.

Recorded on a shoestring budget, *Waiting For A Miracle* sounds like it was beamed down from orbit. The production, handled by Colin Thurston (who had worked with Duran Duran and Iggy Pop), captures the band's ethereal qualities without sacrificing their underlying power. This isn't the sterile coldness of early synth-pop, but something more organic – a chill that seeps into your bones rather than merely frosting the surface.

The album's musical style defies easy categorization, existing in the liminal space between post-punk's architectural severity and new wave's melodic accessibility. Fellows' guitar work is particularly striking, employing effects and delay to create vast sonic landscapes that seem to stretch beyond the horizon. His vocals, meanwhile, possess an otherworldly quality – simultaneously intimate and distant, as if he's singing from the other end of a long-distance phone call to Earth.

Opening track "Independence Day" sets the tone perfectly, with its hypnotic bassline and shimmering guitar textures creating an immediate sense of unease and beauty. The song builds slowly, methodically, like watching a spacecraft dock in slow motion. It's a masterclass in tension and release, establishing the band's ability to find drama in restraint.

"Total War" stands as perhaps the album's finest moment, a six-minute epic that showcases the band's range and ambition. Beginning with a stark, almost tribal drum pattern, the song gradually layers on synthesizers and guitar until it becomes a towering monument of controlled chaos. Fellows' lyrics, dealing with personal and political conflict, are delivered with the detached cool of a war correspondent filing reports from the emotional battlefield.

The title track, "Waiting For A Miracle," demonstrates the band's more accessible side without compromising their artistic vision. Built around a hypnotic keyboard sequence and one of Fellows' most memorable vocal melodies, it's the closest thing to a conventional song on the album, yet still maintains that distinctive sense of cosmic displacement that makes The Comsat Angels so compelling.

"We Were," meanwhile, showcases the band's ability to craft genuine pathos within their atmospheric framework. It's a song about memory and loss that manages to be both deeply personal and universally resonant, with Anderson's bass providing a steady heartbeat beneath layers of ethereal guitar and keyboard textures.

While *Waiting For A Miracle* didn't achieve massive commercial success upon its release, its influence has grown considerably over the decades. The album's combination of post-punk architecture and ambient atmosphere would prove highly influential on subsequent generations of musicians, from the shoegaze movement of the late '80s to contemporary post-rock bands.

The Comsat Angels continued recording throughout the '80s and beyond, but never quite recaptured the perfect storm of innovation and inspiration that produced their debut. The band's later work, while often excellent, couldn't match the alien beauty and mysterious power of *Waiting For A Miracle*.

Today, the album stands as a testament to the creative possibilities that emerged from post-punk's fertile chaos. It's a record that rewards patience and repeated listening, revealing new details and textures with each encounter. In an era of instant gratification and compressed dynamics, *Waiting For A Miracle* remains a powerful reminder that some of music's greatest pleasures come to those willing to wait, listen, and dream.