Send "Cass McCombs " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Cass McCombs works quietly. Over the course of three full-lengths and five years, McCombs has quickly slipped in and out of scenes, skipping from one major American city to the next like he owed stacks of cash in every one. He's played with folk, grafting bedroom pop flourishes to sonic skeletons just strong enough to support them. He swam through 1980s Brit jangle and deep chasms of reverb. No matter how much mileage he accrued, one constant held firm: His lyrical shell games often kept listeners at arm's length, regardless of how well-crafted and inviting his melodies were. McCombs' songs were addictively opaque-- easy to hear, tough to digest, and even more difficult to describe to your friends over beers.McCombs' slipperiness seemed as much like a rejection and re-routing of the traditional singer-songwriter tag as it did a refusal to meet a listener halfway, as though the dude were allergic to interpretation or the idea that someone, anyone, might want to peer inside his braincave. It all sounds like a carefully conceived blend between garden-variety male vulnerability issues and wild-eyed, guitar-toting-dude-who-fancies-himself-an-enigma bullshit. But on Catacombs, his fourth full-length and most stripped-down effort to date, the singer-songwriter steps out from behind the curtain that's cloaked his work in the past. And despite the sparser arrangements and increased focus on direct lyricism, it's every bit as aurally hypnotic as his previous work. It seems like he realized there was someone he really did want to sing to....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| With the committed obliqueness of his lyrics and the adult-contemporary burnish that shines through his Morrissey-centered musical religion, Concord, Calif.’s Cass McCombs is a grotesque hybrid of 19th-century dandy and ‘90s sitcom dad. He sings lines like, “Prima donna / Dodged a call from / The investor,” with a subtle – but real – sense of urgency that lacks any sense of earnestness. Earnestness is an important illusion to get away from in indie rock, where everyone wears plaid but nobody listens to “Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs.”. Catacombs doesn’t continue in the red-herring autobiographical mode of its predecessor, 2007’s Dropping The Writ. Many of the album’s songs – including two of its best, “You Saved My Life” and “Dreams-Come-True-Girl” – are heavy on the second person. And naturally, his interlocutor remains as slippery as the “real” Cass ostensibly hiding behind all the good-natured smokescreening. Musically, LP No. 4 has mostly dropped the dark, jangly mode of early tracks like “Sacred Heart” while preserving a Byzantine quality. It’s a twisty, somber affair as promised by the cover art, and Catacombs is also McCombs’ first album to fully realize that indirectness and specificity aren’t mutually exclusive qualities. Lyrically mushy but melodically solid songs like Dropping The Writ’s “Crick in My Neck” are superseded by 11 distinct vignettes that only flirt with album-length themes. It’s a small difference, ultimately: the album loses its inital momentum with track five, “The Executioner’s Song,” only one song deeper than Writ’s wall, “Petrified Forest.” But then, attending to smallness is what his music is meant to do. Catacombs is graced by some articulate steel-guitar playing that is particularly effective in underlining McCombs’ calm, reedy delivery. The dialogue that forms between Writ’s opening track, “Lionkiller,” and this album’s quasi-sequel, “Lionkiller Got Married” is one of the album’s tiny virtues. Both songs are built around an unrelenting pulse, but the self-affirmation that opens and unravels through the earlier song (“I was born in a hospital...”) is twinned with the sound of sarcasm crumbling back into meaning (“I feel sorry for that kid / He had potential / I mean it / I really do...”). Although both songs are the most aggressive on their respective albums, the keening synthesizer backing of "Lionkiller Got Married" couples with McCombs’ measured words to give the impression of torchlight flickering on cave walls, a rugged kind of chiaroscuro....full text |
| Contactmusic |
| Cass McCombs is a singer songwriter based in LA and whilst he has a relatively cool name, I'm afraid I can't be so enigmatic about his fifth album 'Catacombs'. The album seems chucked together in places and in others it can be quite annoying. On a positive note there are sparse drops of nice slide guitar and acoustic guitar work on the album, but it's not enough to hold up the album on its own. The opener 'Dreams Come True Girl' starts off with a pleasant mellow beat, McCombs vocals enter with an inoffensive sixties flavour, simple lyrics, so not too bad I suppose. The song however never really builds up to anything and its over five minutes long. This is then followed by a truly irritating song called 'Prima Donna' which feels like the lyrics were written independently from any form of music or melody, stretching the title to fit the timing. A stab at a current hot potato of a topic, Politics, also ends much like a car crash in 'Don't Vote'. Cass McCombs seems to have tried to adopt a story telling approach to his writing, like greats such Dylan or Cash, but the lyrics have no cajones and the music has a disinterested sound....full text |
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