Cass McCombs – Not The Way / A / PREfection

4AD

Cass McCombs has been plying his alternative singer-songwriter trade for the best part of twenty-five years now with his releases in latter years finding a home on Domino and most recently Anti, but his original three records were released on Baltimore-based Monitor Records with 4AD taking an interest on this side of the Atlantic and giving them a deserved European release.

After years of them being out of print, 4AD have taken the decision to repress the two LPs and an EP and allow them to straggle back out into the world, hopefully spreading their ramshackle charm to a new generation of listeners. Cass has been constructing his own little musical universe over the last quarter-century, so to listeners old and new alike, it is fascinating to rediscover how this journey started and all three of these releases are essential to that.

Starting in 2002, the inaugural EP release Not The Way was just Cass with friend and producer Jason Quever of Papercuts recording six shuffling narcotic lullabies, his levity and skewed lyricism stretched across splashing cymbals and slow lilting melancholy. The voice is a thing of quiet beauty, yearning, a little desperate and a little out of control with no particularly conscious attempt at rhyming or meter. There is a quavering, mesmeric quality that, perhaps due also to the somnolent tempos, shares a little something with Bill Callahan‘s early Smog output, but with far less misanthropy.

The drums struggle to pick up their feet and the words seem to drop in onto the guitar lines like fruit falling from a tree. “You’re always so damn pure”, he opines at one point, sounding demoralised; yet at another juncture he tells us, “I never met a man I didn’t like”. His observations are often slightly oblique and the sentences are essential in their specific form, regardless of the song structure, the capricious vocal stretches part of the charm.

Spread between guitar- and piano-based songs, the latter sounding a little rinky-dink and faintly out of tune, as if liberated from a closed-down bar, there is enough variety considering the general tempo and certainly enough poetic antics: “A letter came today / Fields have turned brown” or “I’m nobody’s puppy / Not your doggy-woggy” to keep the listener returning.

In fact, towards the end the narcotic country of final track “It’s Getting Closer” finds honky-tonk piano and sleepy Rhodes ideal bedfellows, and a suitable conclusion to this introductory offering.

The first album A was issued a year later, and here the duo of Cass and Jason was bolstered by various friends who assisted where necessary; but it was essentially a continuation of the EP on a slightly grander scale, with more opportunity for lyrical dexterity and a wider range of subjects.

The opening line certainly grabs the imagination though: “I dare not cough or breathe deep” from “I Went To The Hospital” is quite a dramatic opening gambit, even though later we hear “I may soon be gone to pluck on a harp”. There are elements of the lyrics that put me in mind of Jonathan Richman, but maybe it is just his willingness to try anything, regardless of how soft or dotty it might appear if it is essential to the overall sound.

In general the basic musical structures are simple: three-chord strums, slow aching tempos, twinkly electric motifs, organ drones and the regular use of descending notes which all add towards a bare framework around which the vocals thread.

The guitars grow a bit slashy on “What Isn’t Nature” and the guitars clash with the organ on “AIDS In Africa”, which suits the oblique lyrics and you can’t help but feel that he is experimenting with his delivery across the album. There is no desire to push the songs and the length of time it takes for him to deliver the title of “A Comedian Is Someone Who Tells Jokes” is a wonder. Elsewhere the garage recording, stop-start scraps of “Gee, It’s Good To Be Back Home” rubs shoulders with the dreamlike drift of “Meet Me Here At Dawn”.

I love his tale of how “They was much badder times when the bible was wrote” and its mid-tempo jangle, while the horse rhythm, C&W swagger of “My Pilgrim Dear” is a little more obscure although certain lines can’t help but put a smile on your face. Its neighbour “Bedding Down Post Xmas-time” pours on the despair, the ever-repeated line “You’ve got me wrong” drilling into your skull, rhythm dragging its heels unwilling to complete the job.

The album is a fantastic selection and one that puts you firmly into his skewed worldview at a particular moment, but such is the charm that you can’t help but return.

For the second album PREfection, which was released a couple of years later, a group of sorts (to tour A) had coalesced around Cass: Trevor Shimizu on bass and sampler, Natalie Conn on keyboards and Dutch.E.Germ on drums, with production duties ceded by Jason to Bill Skibbe and Jessica Ruffin, there was a change of sound as well as of scope.

With this collection, you could feel the brakes released and having struck up a good live relationship, only a week was required in the studio. It wasn’t as if they were suddenly Steely Dan though. The vocals are a little sweeter, but still ranging in search of the perfect delivery for the words, while at times the drums sound as if they were recorded next door. The distant, dreamy delivery and strange changes of pace give the impression that there is a short attention span at work.

The songs are more textural, with Trevor also credited with sampler; but there is still a kind of audacity at work, with certain phrases incurring an odd effect: “Human skull, human skull without body, I feel your pull” and the organ accelerates, soaring in an epic fashion that leaves the inward-looking perspective of A on another plane.

There is some bass-led, post-punk grind on “Multiple Suns”, with the words dipping and diving around the basic structure, ’60s psych garage organ on the revved up “Tourist Woman” and even a kind of Eastern slant to the enthusiastic “Sacred Heart”, which revels in the prettiness of its vocal melody as the song chops and changes around the hectic words. There is even some Flaming Lips-style melodrama on “She’s Still Suffering” and sheer yearning romanticism on the melancholic organ-infused “Cuckoo”. Overall, this album is where Cass’s true vision starts to blossom, with plenty of space for the songs to thrive and assistance from players that prevent too much introversion.

The fact that toward the end we have the madcap, almost comical late-Velvet Underground-influenced “Bury Mary” followed by the slow gauzy beauty of the penultimate track “City Of Brotherly love”, with its aching vocal melody and the utterly lovely “Welly welly well!” exclamation delivered before the instrumental burst highlights all that came before. It just makes my heart swell.

The fact that he chooses to end the album with the ten-minute “All Your Dreams May Come True” that is part wonky travelogue, experimenting with psychotic time changes, and part audio vérité that sounds as though it was recorded outside a building break-in with police sirens and alarms clashing says a lot of what he felt was possible.

For me, this album was a key to various future doors, but one that has never really been bettered; the result of a rash of new ideas, a devil-may-care attitude and a sense of freedom. All three records are essential but PREfection is the killer.

-Mr Olivetti-