Cass McCombs
Wit’s End
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Domino
The production on Cass McCombs’ new album Wit’s End is airtight without sounding cold or digital. This is a credit to Ariel Rechtshaid, a producer who enjoys success from his work with Glasser, We Are Scientists and MURS. Having teased out McCombs’ demons on Catacombs in 2009, he is back on Wit’s End to further enable this dark turn to self-reflexive madness and instrumental doom. “This is a world of total feeling,” the splash page for McCombs’ website says. His self-referential sentimentality on the album confirms this maxim and indeed for McCombs, it is a “world of total feeling,” as he speaks to us from inside claustrophobic walls of his blackened emotions. The title of the fifth installment in his canon, Wit’s End signifies the fray of McCombs’ contentment while heralding his confrontation with the absurdity of existence and quotidian melancholia. Slow-handed guitars and bare pianos supply a folksy backdrop to his slow immolation.
So then let’s shed the usage of the ugly, boring genre descriptor “singer-songwriter” and call Cass McCombs, rather, a crooner-exorcizer. Lyrically he’s an exorcist of his own existential torments and vocally he’s a soother of the eardrum like a hi-fi Jeremy Jay. On Wit’s End, McCombs calls on other singular warriors of dissatisfaction and woe from before his time such as Bob Dylan and Elliott Smith. McCombs employs emphatic rhyming on “The Lonely Doll” to expound this poem about a tragic, distant feminine character. Exigent yet slow, the Dylan delivery here comes as half-spoken, half-sung. Brush-stroked snares carry the slow, waltzy rise and fall of the paired guitar and xylophone, demonstrating McCombs’ patient, rhythmically accented storytelling.
On “Buried Alive” McCombs traffics his existential trauma through empirical contradictions about being able to smell stinking corpses without being able to see them. The faint pump of a farouche flute, perhaps borrowed from Jon Brion’s studio, tickles your ear. “Saturday Song” continues the lilting figures of the flute but with a gentle piano instead. McCombs leaves Bob Dylan territory and enters the vocal terrains of Elliott Smith, prolonging the articulation of vowels with pain and foreboding sustain. “Saturday Song” eerily recalls the steadiness of Smith’s “Everything Means Nothing To Me,” the sonic semblance is striking both in instrumentation and in lyrical context. McCombs trades Smith’s, “Everything means nothing to me” for “She’s everything today, you’re everything today” – both sung over interlocked piano and light percussion. Smith’s spirit is summoned again on “Pleasant Shadow Song” when McCombs rounds out words like “place” and “will.” He curls those “l”s and squeezes the sound of an “n” in through the nose, embodying the late singer’s vocal idiosyncrasies.
“Memory Stain” and “Hermit’s Cave” offer playful vocal measures that complement congruent guitar and piano melodies. “Memory Stain” is sad and honky, cautioning the fatality of indulging in jealousy supported by hubris. He addresses the naivety of youth explaining that a “calf is easy to brand” and that they’re “…not bored, just sleep deprived/ Drunk on jealousy and pride/ Boozing the highest aim/ When spittle won’t get out memory’s stain.” “Hermit’s Cave” details physical and mental solitude. Twice, the amplification of what sounds like a rubber band being pulled and released against a stack of paper appears. This unusual and puzzling percussive character on the album punctuates the darker-felt meters of the composition, conjuring the imagery of a shutting door or a closing coffin, solidifying the setting of “Hermit’s Cave.”
Nine and a half minute long closer “A Knock Upon the Door” features what sounds like the homemade drum set from Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs’ You Can’t Buy A Gun When You’re Crying. Cass McCombs concludes Wit’s End with scenes of winter, curses and prostitution. “A Knock Upon the Door” stages a clever interwoven dialogue between a modern minstrel and his broken muse to discuss human frailty and desperation. “Were I sincere/ You bet I’d hear a knock upon your door,” and later, “Hell is real and so will be your sores/ Heck with sincere, hark, I hear a knock upon the door.”
Wit’s End smells like death but McCombs is alive to the world around him. He’s attuned to selfishness and consequently, to misery too. The new nine track full length marks his survival, achieved through creativity and collaboration, despite his outward pessimism. Wit’s End affirms that we can count on Cass McCombs, griot of grief, to weld our postmodern anxieties into folklore.
