By Mike McGuirk

Amps sound better louder.
- Noel Harmonson, Comets on Fire

FIRST OFF, this has almost nothing to do with Comets on Fire, but I need to retract something I wrote in the Bay Guardian last summer about the Grateful Dead (see "Doodah Man: A Music Snob Gives It up for Uncle John's Band, Sort Of," 7/2/03). I said some things that weren't exactly flattering. I took potshots at Jerry Garcia, something I've done all my life. But I gotta say that after seeing the concert film Festival Express last week, I take back every negative thing I wrote or said. This may seem self-indulgent, and I would agree if I hadn't received an actual death threat after that article ran – so it's serious business.

So this is for that guy, the guy who wanted to cut my head off and wrote in to tell me to watch myself: I take it back. After watching the Dead cruise through "New Speedway Boogie" in that movie, with two drummers playing so deep inside the humming of the universe and with Jerry playing just behind the beat like he was born to, I almost wet myself, like, 10 times. I have to say not only do the Dead rule but also all their records are great, every last one. I'm buying Touch of Grey tomorrow. I'll love it. Phil Lesh? Amazing dude. Bob Weir? A god. Mickey Hart recording with Sammy Hagar? Forgotten. Go see that movie. Janis Joplin pulls a kick that signals the crash-in start of "Cry Baby," and it's really wonderful.

OK, so Comets on Fire: last night John Whitson, the darkly mysterious proprietor of Holy Mountain, a San Francisco label dedicated to keeping the flames of psychedelia burning, said to me, "Comets on Fire – finally an American band with balls. Comets are like post-punk Grateful Dead with balls," and everything made sense.

He's right. Comets on Fire play with their massive balls proudly displayed at all times, and they're American, and they play psych. The only other American bands I can think of who've earned their psych badges are the Grateful Dead and Monoshock. I'll explain about Monoshock in a minute. Just accept for now that if Monoshock and the Dead had s-e-x, the baby would be Comets on Fire.

Cathedral of rock

This is the loudest, furriest, heaviest, and psychedelic-est band to come along in quite some time. The band was formed by guitarist Ethan Miller and bass player Ben Flashman in Santa Cruz in 1999. Noel Harmonson and Utrillo Kushner came on, as Echoplex player and drummer, respectively, shortly thereafter. For the record, Kushner is one of the most insane Keith Moon clones alive, and, as Whitson put it, "Harmonson is what makes Comets on Fire like Tom Constantine-era Grateful Dead." You have to be a real dork to get that one. Anyway, most recently Six Organs of Admittance sonic priest Ben Chasny joined up full-time on second outta-hand guitar, and with people on both coasts freaking out about their new record, Blue Cathedral, on Sub Pop, what we have is a band exploding in a big way. And a psychedelic band at that, which is interesting.

What if Comets On Fire get really popular? Are New York and Mission hipsters gonna start tripping their balls off instead of doing coke all the time? I, for one, wanna see what happens to the whole bike messenger look when people start really freaking out and tie-dyeing everything.

For anyone who hasn't heard Comets on Fire or had the air around them melted by one of their marathon live sets, the band play superheavy rock music with a focus on unapologetic guitar heroics. Psychedelic freak-outs play a major part of the deal. We're talking wet hair, weird facial expressions, deal-with-it guitar solos – the sort of thing that used to make dogs explode in the Bay Area in 1968. Their last record, Field Recordings from the Sun (Ba Da Bing!), starts out with seven minutes of shimmering tambourine and drum-circle weirdness before blasting off into some harrowing space-coaster ride with barely intelligible vocals and Stooge riffs so deformed that they're retarded.

Blue Cathedral is similar – it only further expands on psych music, counterpointing blaring Detroit rock with Incredible String Cheese Band acoustic guitars and gentle pianos. There's Albert Ayler-style free jazz in there too for the real serious music fan. It's recorded real well, so you can play it loud, loud, loud – very important – and also has this tune, "Pussyfoot the Duke," that comes out of nowhere. The song is built around a descending piano line and little guitar dribbles that float around getting more and more LSD-enhanced-sunset-beautiful as it goes. Then the beatings begin again until "Brotherhood of the Harvest" comes drifting down, and suddenly Comets are playing Saucerful of Secrets- and Meddle-era Floyd at the same time, which I didn't know was possible.

Turn it up

Volume is a very important thing. I mean, really, rock music is all about volume. It's my favorite part a lot of the time, even. Music so loud that it makes your eyes bleed. I love that. Sometimes people do it wrong, and it's a mess, though. One time I was at the Edinburgh Castle Pub, and this band had their guitar up so loud that I wanted to punch everyone around me. The effect of ungodly volume – when in the right hands, like at a Growing show, where you feel as if the amplifiers are actual living organisms – can be calming. Comets on Fire use volume somewhere in between.

The first time I saw Comets, at the Parkside two years ago, some normal band opened up. I forget who they were, but they didn't want to hurt anybody. Comets came out, and their first song just flattened the room. It also went on for 10 minutes longer than I expected. It started out as this loud Stooge rock, and then all of a sudden, I realized we were in real space-out territory, and then everything got insanely loud again. All I could think of was Monoshock.

Monoshock were a Bay Area space-freak chaos outfit active in the early '90s, and they're probably the best band ever after the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Go find their only album, Walk to the Fire (BlackJack) – it rules. Comets on Fire combined then – and still do now, only with, like, a thousand more influences bubbling up everywhere – the over-the-top guitar pyrotechnics of hairy-chested arena-rock gods of the '70s, this mystical Grateful Dead Anthem of the Sun-ish experimentalism, and the dirty, Stooge-fried bad trip that was Monoshock.

This is what saves Comets from falling into retro and cliché ditches of irrelevance – a willingness to take things to absurd levels, whether it's the paint-shriveling volumes at their shows, the fact that pretty much everything they hear goes into their records, or the total disregard for an underground music scene that has a tendency to pooh-pooh guitar solos.

Maybe this is the start of the revolution I've been claiming is gonna happen for three years. Maybe with USA Is a Monster channeling American Indian spirits and Growing making New Age music safe for the rest of us, weird, psychedelic, mystical heavy rock will become the big mainstream seller we all know it deserves to be. Well, actually that might be the biggest load of horseshit this writer has ever dropped, but still I hope it happens.

Comets on Fire play a CD-release show with Killer's Kiss and Gris Gris Fri/20, 10 p.m., Parkside, 1600 17th St., S.F. Call for price. (415) 503-0393. They also play with Black Dice and Animal Collective Aug. 25, 9 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $13. (415) 885-0750.