Land (The Comsat Angels album)

Land
Studio album by
The Comsat Angels
ReleasedSeptember 1983
RecordedJune 1983
StudioBattery Studios, London
GenreNew wave, post-punk
Length42:22 (LP)
LabelJive
ProducerMike Howlett
The Comsat Angels chronology
Fiction
(1982) 		Land
(1983) 		7 Day Weekend
(1985)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[1]
Smash Hits8/10[2]

Land is the Comsat Angels' fourth album, released in September 1983 on Jive Records. The album was reissued on CD in 2001 with five B-sides as bonus tracks for Jive's "Connoisseur Collection".

The song "Independence Day," originally from their debut album, Waiting for a Miracle, was rerecorded for Land. "Will You Stay Tonight" and "Independence Day" received a reasonable amount of airplay and charted in the UK at No. 81 and No. 71, respectively. "Island Heart" was also released as a single.[3]

Land was the first of two albums for the Jive label and was viewed as a major departure from the Comsats' first three albums. Frontman Stephen Fellows looked back in a 2006 interview: "We made more commercial albums in the mid-'80s because the record company wanted us to do so. We were happy to find a new label after the commercially not-so-successful first albums." He regretted the result, but their options seemed limited because of the pop music world at the time. "Indie didn’t really exist, so we had no choice. But in retrospect we should have [stuck] to our early sound".[4] Bass player Kevin Bacon put it this way: "The demos we did for Land were really good. It was a weird time for us – we felt deflated after being dropped after three albums by Polydor. Eighties pop values were rife; we didn’t naturally fit in, but were all into being popular (pop) and felt we could achieve it in a more damning way. We didn’t think Land was crap at the time, we just didn’t think it was us".[5]

Track listing 1983

[edit]

All tracks written by Fellows/Glaisher/Bacon/Peake

  1. "Will You Stay Tonight?" – 4:21
  2. "Alicia (Can You Hear Me?)" – 3:54
  3. "A World Away" – 5:11
  4. "Independence Day" (re-recording) – 3:50
  5. "Nature Trails" – 4:55
  6. "Mister Memory" – 5:18
  7. "Island Heart" – 3:54
  8. "I Know That Feeling" – 5:20
  9. "As Above, So Below" – 5:39

Track listing 2001

[edit]

All tracks written by Fellows/Glaisher/Bacon/Peake

  1. "Will You Stay Tonight?" – 4:21
  2. "Alicia (Can You Hear Me?)" – 3:54
  3. "A World Away" – 5:11
  4. "Independence Day" (re-recording) – 3:50
  5. "Nature Trails" – 4:55
  6. "Mister Memory" – 5:18
  7. "Island Heart" – 3:54
  8. "I Know That Feeling" – 5:20
  9. "As Above So Below" – 5:39
  10. "A World Away" (Dub) – 4:57
  11. "Shining Hour" – 4:29
  12. "Island Heart" (Dub) – 6:00
  13. "Scissors and the Stone" – 4:31
  14. "Intelligence"* – 4:32

Personnel

[edit]
The Comsat Angels

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Allmusic review
  2. ^ Martin, Peter. "Albums". Smash Hits (29 September – 12 October 1983): 21.
  3. ^ Comsat Angels website "The Comsat Angels - Discography". Archived from the original on 30 December 2012. Retrieved 25 March 2013.
  4. ^ "Steve Fellows interview, 2006". Archived from the original on 19 October 2009. Retrieved 7 September 2008.
  5. ^ the comsat angels, q&a
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