Land
Studio album by The Comsat Angels
Released	September 1983
Recorded	June 1983
Studio	Battery Studios, London
Genre	New wave, post-punk
Length	42:22 (LP)
Label	Jive
Producer	Mike Howlett
The Comsat Angels chronology
Fiction (1982) Land (1983) 7 Day Weekend (1985)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[1]
Smash Hits	8/10 [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

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

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

The Comsat Angels

• Stephen Fellows - vocals, guitar
• Andy Peake - synthesizer, vocals
• Kevin Bacon - bass guitar
• Mik Glaisher - drums

References