Cass McCombs - Dropping The Writ

By Daniel Johnson
October 9, 2007

Don't let Cass McCombs fool you. Not with his tissue-soft rock or the added aloe of his viscous tenor. Not with the middle class and Catholic references in his dense lyric sheet or with the workmanlike economy of his productions. Don't let him fool you into thinking he's as easy-going or intellectually gentle as the warm bottom and feathery top of his calmly beautiful new record Dropping The Writ might imply. Don't be fooled because the fact is, anybody who writes the kind of lyrics that Cass McCombs does is writhing inside; is pricked with the pins and needles of creative impetus; has the butterflies, hears voices, hops on coals. Cass McCombs is a sensitive savage; another in a distinguished line stretching back from Elliott Smith to Nick Drake who veil their aggression behind a mask of languid sweetness.

"Lionkiller" begins with a jagged, rolling guitar arpeggio that gives way to a medieval marching-stomp of bass and drums. In stark, unflowery language McCombs relates nothing less than his life story, starting with birth - I was born in a hospital that was very big and white/The hands of a male doctor pulled me into the light - and continuing into his suburban rearing - I am called Scorpio if they got the date right/I cannot transcend this caste even if I tried. It's huge and captivating. But don't let "Lionkiller"'s bombast fool you either. It has a big roar but Bugcollector would be a better name for the rest of the record's small-scale vignettes and esoteric close-ups of broader, everyday mysteries.

"Deseret" is pocket-sized transcendentalism and a meditation on renewal. Falling in and out of falsetto, McCombs sings Buzz across the universe to the mind's hive/Beyond a shadow of a doubt you're lucky to be alive. "Full Moon or Infinity" softly pummels ahead like a maniacal Appalachian lullaby arranged by Henry Mancini. McCombs sounds a little unhinged, suppressing a wail, I don't know what's come over me/The full moon or infinity.

If it weren't for McCombs's tunefulness, most of the literate whimsy would be for naught. But he has a gift for melody that makes lines like these from "Petrified Forrest" seem musical: Our lives weave a pattern/A staff twined by adders; and later, Do you ever get the feeling that you're being followed by a van?/Yesterdays yet to come.

Dropping the Writ could be Midlake fronted by Neil Finn. It has that band's judicious use of arrangement and overdub and Finn's pure singing style. So many of today's best tenors (e.g., Ryan Adams, Patrick Wolf ) heap too much theatrical quiver onto their deliveries. McCombs doesn't feel the need to put any of that sauce on it. He just lets it be.

McCombs's is an odd deception, but a rewarding one. It sounds light and lovely but it's infested with heart-crunching couplets and pincer-jawed one-liners. If you like beat mysticism and rudely textured fairy tales coated in effervescent hooks that help the medicine go down, Dropping the Writ is probably just the thing for you. Just don't say you weren't warned.