Cass McCombs - Interior Live Oak
★★★★
DOMINO
When it comes to Cass McCombs, there’s a risk of complacency. Not on his side – on Interior Live Oak, the Californian singer-songwriter is as watchful as ever – but from that of the listener, who after 11 albums of cosmically questing music might simply expect nothing less than a line as richly allusive as, “I was working as a soda jerk/Listening to old Panthers’ stories/Over lime rickeys and tuna fish”, or a song that spins around 19th-century Irish-Bavarian proto-burlesque superstar Lola Montez.
Steadily, however, Interior Live Oak becomes the kind of record it’s impossible to be casual about. After releasing 2024’s Seed Cake On New Year, a collection of unreleased music from around 2000, McCombs was inspired to return to his formative San Francisco stamping ground and record with his earliest collaborators (among them Jason Quever on drums and cello and bassist Chris Cohen). There are startling moments: the title track’s D&D blues-rock, for example, The Groundhogs doing The Tempest in a nasty basement; or Juvenile’s ice-rink keyboards, McCombs ennobling and mocking adolescence (“You suck/I suck/Primus sucks”). Other songs, though, creep up more subtly, such as Miss Mabee’s Elliott Smith hush, or Peace’s heartbreaking Go-Betweens valediction.
The other good reason to resist complacency is McCombs as the unreliable narrator’s unreliable narrator. His music might have an easy way with a loping, looping riff or motif, but it can often be a trap. “I mean everything I say,” he sings on Asphodel, “or something quite like it.” On the millpond piano of I Never Dream About Trains – a homage to Robyn Hitchcock, who narrated a trailer for 2019’s Tip Of The Sphere – he repeats “I never lie in my songs”, a line that immediately suggests lying. “I never dream about holding you,” he sings, “on the sand in Pescadero/While the herons dive into the waves.”
Like Dan Bejar or Bill Callahan, McCombs adeptly slips between realities. Those who find themselves in his songs can expect to be transformed, no longer just lover, friend, chance encounter, but an epic hero, a warrior, a creature in the throes of metamorphosis. “You slapped the Devil across his face/He puked up ice and black bile,” sings McCombs on Priestess, a scuffed Steely Dan elegy for a friend. On Asphodel, he encounters a “junkie on Leavenworth” who insists that an underworld portal exists under San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid.
The Asphodel Meadows were the afterlife destination for ordinary, “mediocre” Ancient Greeks, a budget version of five-star Elysium. Home At Last indicates where McCombs thinks he belongs: “Unremarkable in every way/In my time, forgotten/On my tombstone, let it say/ Here lies no one.” It might suit McCombs to play the elusive songwriter, adrift in a world taking him for granted, but unfortunately, while he keeps making records as excellent as this, Asphodel will have to wait.
Interior Live Oak is out August 15th on Domino.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Track Listing:
1. Priestess
2. Peace
3. Missionary Bell
4. Miss Mabee
5. Home At Last
6. I'm Not Ashamed
7. Who Removed The Cellar Door?
8. A Girl Named Dogie
9. Asphodel
10. I Never Dream About Trains
11. Van Wyck Expressway
12. Lola Montez Danced The Spider Dance
13. Juvenile
14. Diamonds In The Mine
15. Strawberry Moon
16. Interior Live Oak
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