Review: Cass McCombs – Catacombs (2009)
The simple descending lilt of the excellent “The Executioner’s Song” creates a tenuous duality around the simpleton executioner: he takes deep pride in his grisly employment, and McCombs’ quiet earnestness can nearly excuse the character’s ill-placed sentimentality. Tracks like “Harmonia” and “You Saved My Life” even redeem the slide guitar with genuineness: “darling, now I / must live for you / one reprieve grants another / until each world is born anew.” In short, Cass McCombs plays the kind of dreamy, easygoing folk that you want to have on hand for a summer afternoon. Jack Johnson’s idle beach-bumming is a waste of your time next to McCombs; the two artists are, while only tangentially related in genre, great personifications of the difference between ‘simplistic’ and ‘simple.’
The aforementioned dichotomies extend across Catacombs; though the sunny guitars and gentle crooning sound amicable, the album’s themes approach shadowy, heady depths. Pop-country spends so much time wading through a schmaltzy sea of worn-in love, untied shoes, and diaper stories that its impossibly pristine production is often little more than a brutish, stark monolith. In the face of such smooth vapidity, it is the subtleties littered over Catacombs that we must ferret out and cherish. His video for “Dreams-Come-True Girl,” for example, is such a dreamy folk wonder that it might seem natural to have it performed from a rock wall running through some bright rural setting, or perhaps under a shady tree. Instead, Cass stands on a darkened stage in some skate park warehouse; skaters and their teenage lovers are huddled close and sharing their stationary decks as platforms on which to pledge their youthful, exuberant love (by smooching). It’s such a playfully innocent video, and so charming in its approach — the naughtiest thing in it might only be guest vocalist Karen Black’s leering presence — one can’t help but recall their own distant memories of such carefree afternoon get-togethers. It’s such a righteous use of of their time that perhaps, by the end of it, with Black pouting to be taken dancing, youth doesn’t seem like such a waste on the young.
Cass McCombs’ “Dreams-Come-True Girl (feat. Karen Black),” from Catacombs.
[...] Whenever folk and country seem to be running out of options, there comes an almost epiphanic arrival of some nonchalant, cigarette-flicking savior, sometimes even in the form of an artist who’s been kicking around for the better part of a decade. The shuffling, unassuming latest from Cass McCombs carries both the urgency of the city life he’s been inextricably servant to for the last decade, combined with the lounging ease of his California home. It’s a dichotomy in theory only, however, because Catacombs isn’t some grand amalgamated statement, it’s just a simple, troublingly deep folk/country record. (Full-length review here.) [...]
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