Pitchfork
70
A friend once told me a story about the singer-songwriter Cass McCombs that I've always liked. One night, my friend was at a party in the Bay Area when McCombs showed up with a guest. It was a real punk-rock party. (My friend remembers overhearing someone insist that what people didn't understand about the American Revolution was that the American Revolution was still going on.) My friend was sitting on the porch when McCombs and his guest came out to leave. He said McCombs looked like he was about to cry. Not in a remarkable way, but like about-to-cry was his resting face. "Well," McCombs said to his guest, "we were just two sweaters at a sweatshirt party." They left without saying goodbye.
This was about 15 years ago, before McCombs had released his first album (the enigmatically titled A), but the sweater bit was prophetic. McCombs is one of those artists who looks out of place no matter where you put him. His biography says he was born in Concord, Calif., but it seems hard to say where he's from (in the metaphorical sense) or even where he lives (in the utility-bill one). He has no attachment to any particular scene, and though he has collaborated with a hundred unrelated artists over the last decade—including a producer for Vampire Weekend and Adele (Ariel Rechtshaid), the bass player from Phish (Mike Gordon), and an Academy Award–nominated actress (the late Karen Black)—he often appears to be totally alone, a tumbleweed drifting through the interior of nowhere. Characters in Cass McCombs songs are executioners, truck drivers, lifelong bachelors who treat liquor as their personal ticket to the moon and other people for whom being alone is not the product of bad luck but of religious election. At one point he only answered interview questions through the mail.
The style of McCombs' music differs from album to album but all shares a low-key American spirit that joins the personal freedom of '60s counterculture with the reticence of late-'90s indie rock—cowboy music for people with a lot of library fines. As a writer, he has a trickster's gift for resignation: He makes misery seem funny and his ability to control it seem smart. (This is why I tell the "sweater" story: Half because it presents McCombs as a loner, half because it presents him as someone with the ability to understand his solitude so well that he can turn it into a joke that connects with other people. )
His most recent album is a B-sides and outtakes collection called A Folk Set Apart. It covers 2003 to 2014, from A through the Wild West epic of Big Wheel and Others. On it you will hear songs that resemble garage-punk ("A.Y.D."), Neil Young ballads ("Bradley Manning"), nursery rhymes ("Three Men Sitting on a Hollow Log"), and stretches of recorded sound that people in the commuter pool would probably identify as non-music ("Texas").
One of my favorite things about listening to McCombs is that he seems unafraid to make some really bad decisions. This is a man who once orchestrated a three-minute outro that sounds like a dog sleeping in a clarinet ("Memory's Stain") and interrupted an otherwise beautiful song to ask what it was like to shit in space ("Morning Star"). A Folk Set Apart is scattered by nature but it has some of these moments, too—moments in which some line or turn that at first sounds unnatural becomes a signal both of McCombs' quiet confidence and of his casual rebellion against the idea of how songs are supposed to go. It's easy to understand why he was fascinated with someone like Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning, the trans woman dishonorably discharged from the Army and convicted of espionage for her relationship with WikiLeaks: Not only is Manning a modern variation on the American outlaw, but the turns in her life defy every extant script.
So start with Catacombs, or with the funereal WIT'S END or Dropping the Writ. Big Wheel is good, too. They all are in their idiosyncratic, prickly little ways. If pop's goal is to forge a path of identification between artist and listener, McCombs is defiantly un-pop, a singer continually trying to figure out how to outpace his audience's comfort levels without driving them out of the room. In modern parlance, Cass McCombs didn't come here to make friends. Which is good. There are plenty of sweatshirts in the hamper if you want them.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016