Cass McCombs confirmed up late for the twentieth century, like a celebration visitor arriving because the host was lastly slipping off her earrings. Then he wouldn’t go away. Over the 20-odd years since he emerged, a whispery Gen X folkie with a smart-assed streak and bowing bookshelves, he has change into a lighthouse keeper for Boomer beacons: Lennon, Zevon, Dylan, Cohen, Nilsson, Newman, Younger. “Priestess,” the solemnly funky opener of Inside Dwell Oak, glimmers with lime rickeys and wild horses, Ella Fitzgerald and John Prine, and the report typically does little to dispel the phantasm that it might have been made by Gordon Lightfoot in 1974. The issues McCombs does so properly are so acquainted as to be nearly invisible. Why they nonetheless appear so distinctly his is an everlasting thriller. Perhaps it’s simply that he’s grown from being a precocious, pugnacious, quixotic songwriter to being a terrific one, and greatness makes inherited issues appear invented.
If the postwar pop pantheon nonetheless has any room, then McCombs ought to be a shoo-in on the proof of Inside Dwell Oak. Although the album might be fairly humorous, it delivers the products with no humorous enterprise—16 songs and never a throwaway amongst them, every an instance of what works, fairly than an experiment in what may. Songs with beautiful melodies, alert preparations, and good rhetorical mechanisms; songs that make you wow and hmm. Character songs, story songs, bardic American songs that array demotic discuss on mythic patterns, imprinting the identical previous adjustments with a lived texture that’s each distinctive and common. It’s middle-aged in a great way, a report of settled tastes, with ambition and aptitude in equilibrium, and an ideal portal into his one-man canon.
Going again to the properly with previous collaborators like Papercuts’ Jason Quever, McCombs has devised a mode for Inside Dwell Oak that wafts and slithers—half breeze, half snake, with a gradual and deliberate tempo stuffed with coiled energies. There’s Croce-style rococo folks, jangly fuzz rock, sparkly soul, and big-desert nation, in a manufacturing type that emphasizes the haptic shapes of fingers urgent strings, particularly in Brian Betancourt’s nomadic basslines. As ever, a part of the music’s allure lies in its misleading effortlessness and modesty. However that is belied by an astonishing outpouring of phrases that recollects peak Paul Simon in flavorful Americana and enigmatic scope.
When a tune is nice sufficient, just a few good lyrics, with some filler and repetition, will typically get you by. However McCombs has packed literature into these songs, from finish to finish. He begins with scintillating verbal surfaces that might keep our curiosity alone, and infrequently do: “Miss Mabee” performs with the plain homophone for 3 minutes of buoyant energy pop. However normally, having arrange a intelligent conceit, he retains coming again at it from totally different angles, unpacking it into one thing huge and visionary or intimate and profound. The flickering gallop of “Peace” (“‘Peace’ is what we are saying/Once we say goodbye”) made me discover the burden of that informal parting phrase in a manner I hadn’t earlier than, whereas the Tom Petty–like “Who Eliminated the Cellar Door?” demonstrates the intuitive leaps that enlarge the album, superimposing the sting of a flooded basement and the highest of Niagara Falls in a terrific rush of remorse.
