Since 1992, beloved British indie act Comet Gain has been rattling the most obscurant of cages in the service of youth culture sympathy, a staccato stream of iconographic missives to "the kids" as they walk this Earth, cool to the touch and sometimes shaken up inside. If the group hasn't become a household name, it certainly hasn't vanished from sight, even throughout lineup changes, label jumping, and decidedly non-careerist behavior that would have felled thousands of bands in their position. Leader David Feck's positions on how to operate his endeavor run counter-clockwise to just about any other band on a timeline this extended; perhaps no greater evidence of his theories can be found than on Broken Record Prayers, featuring 20 songs culled from singles, compilations, Peel Sessions, and new material recorded between 1997 and 2007. If you've ever wondered what kind of band puts A-list material on a limited-to-500 single that's destined to sit under somebody's bed, wonder no more.   And yet that's the beauty of the Comet Gain machine, and of Broken Record Prayers as a whole. Here, collected, are pages of a scrapbook of eternal youth, the perfect songs to connect the sentiments on a mixtape. Here's to sitting alone in your room, certain that no one else in the world understands what you're feeling until you drop the needle on the record, and all of your colliding thoughts are spelled out for you. Here's to the unsung and the underheard, to the doing it for your own reasons. Here's to decoding the semiotic clues within, and learning all there is to know about the British New Wave. Here's a chance to know what the lucky misfits and clued-in outcasts have known all along, that the masterpieces are in the margins, that each record has a full story to tell, and the singles just have to get there faster than the albums. Here's to speed, to melody, to soul in all of its incarnations. From the elegy of "Jack Nance Hair," written for Heavenly's Mathew Fletcher in the tragic wake of his death, to the clenched fist immediacy of "Beautiful Despair," from the Motown-via-Kirsty MacColl cover of Deena Barnes "If You Ever Walk Out of My Life" to the dance flights and high energy of "Orwell Liberty Dance," here's to figuring it out on your own, with a little help from people thousands of miles away. Most importantly, here's to your newest obsession, in songs that age without so much as a wrinkle or a fallen eyelash.