It’s hard to think of an American songwriter working with a back catalogue of greater quality and a profile kept as deliberately low as Cass McCombs’. Exploring the underbelly of the US psyche as much as his own, over four inimitable albums McCombs has combined oblique lyrics with a musically minimalist aesthetic, gesturing as much towards the country fixtures of AM radio as the aloof poise of Leonard Cohen, in songs as finely wrought as they are unique.
With Wit’s End, McCombs has shifted away from the down-to-earth tenderness that marked 2009’s Catacombs, instead plumbing dark inner spaces and unconfronted fears, the kind that lurk beneath even the most convincing outer show of happiness. Opener ‘County Line’ sets the tone, a warmly nostalgic refrain that recalls the Twin Peaks theme, suggesting fallen expectations and romantic desolation, delivered in Cass’ shiver-inducing high register. Upbeat it ain’t, this cowed melancholy finding its natural extension in the claustrophobic intimacy of ‘Buried Alive’ or the despair of ‘Saturday Song’.
There’s a stillness at the heart of the songs here, a static sense of gradually emergent revelation. The harmonic simplicity of tracks such as ‘The Lonely Doll’ or album closer ‘A Knock Upon The Door’ (which features the same looped riff for nine minutes) is offset by the precision and variety of their arrangements, the instrumentation providing the base which McCombs’ meandering, elusive thoughts sweetly sail over – or return to, as with the bass clarinet-led soft-sell climax of album highlight ‘Memory’s Stain’, into which his seductive voice dissolves.
Wit’s End is alive with the still-questing spirit of a fella whose songs seem to say all that he feels needs be said.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
Wild Beasts - Beautiful Brutes
While originality in pop music is a rare and precious thing, the shock of the new has a tendency to repulse as many as it attracts. Back in 2008, Wild Beasts managed to blindside a UK scene grown comfortable with the likes of Kaiser Chiefs and Muse, and stretch the four-blokes-with-guitars-drums-‘n-bass formula to an outer limit of theatrical faux-camp outrageousness. Their first record, Limbo Panto, split critics and audiences alike, thanks in no small part to Hayden Thorpe’s inimitable vocals, his soaring countertenor liable to swing from wanton caterwaul to velvet croon while never being anything less than hypnotic.
Chatting from his East London flat ahead of the release of the group’s third album, Smother, Thorpe looks back on their initial splash with pride, attributing its more bizarre aspects to youthful naivety and a long, cloistered gestation in their isolated, North England town of Kendal. “There’s a sort of purity to it, in that it was completely unknowingly Dada and avant-garde. We thought we were making pop music,” he muses. “For a long time we were more embarrassed by [the weirder elements], but then we began to realise that those were the things that set us apart.”
Peopled by blokes who are into their booze and footy, Limbo careered between the abject and the divine, its hapless characters slaves to raging libidos and desires that exceed the bounds of what society may deem acceptable or even want to know about – take ‘The Old Dog’ as case in point, a simmeringly lush ballad about casual sex amongst the over-65s. For their follow-up Two Dancers (2009, made “in the aftermath of our dreams with the first record collapsing”), the group reigned in Thorpe’s wilder vocal excesses, giving greater weight to the gruff, moderating baritone of bass player Tom Fleming, while incorporating more electronic textures to produce a sleeker, more sophisticated sound.
This direction has found its logical extension on Smother, the aching carnality of ‘Plaything’ or glowing surface of ‘Albatross’ being reached through a need to “create something of beauty”, as the band challenged themselves with unfamiliar equipment and software to achieve the shimmering textures of the finished songs. “When I pick up a guitar, I know what it’s going to do,” says Thorpe. “I think there’s something rather boring about that. [But] use a sampler or software, and there’s an element of not knowing that I think is crucial for creating the atmosphere that we want to create … You have to be excited about what you’re doing, and one of the ways of doing that is to sort of go into the dark and see what you pull out.
“One of our big realisations was that beauty demands imperfection and demands a crudeness and a brutality sometimes, twinned with a lushness, y’know? It’s like the Photoshop syndrome, where the face has a few blemishes on it, a few pockmarks, but [when] you clear that face up, it’s no longer human … it’s just this generic face. There was a real sense of wanting to maintain those things that make it seem more vulnerable, show ourselves a bit more.”
Although the group was boosted by being signed to Domino early in their career, Thorpe is dubious about success within “the dirty machinery and filthy cogs that work behind the beautiful facade that is the music industry”. “I think we cannot be needy about what we do – it’s not a snatch and grab scenario,” he says. “We’re not the product of hype or sensationalism. Maybe that’s why it’s a slowly growing success; we’re aiming to make a long-range point, rather than make our point and disappear.”
As to what that point might be, try passing the steely-eyed social realism of, say, Mike Leigh, through an aesthetic sensibility more in keeping with Oscar Wilde or Rimbaud. There are few groups brave enough to have delved as deeply into the (sometimes intensely ugly) rents and fissures of male sexuality with such single-minded focus, nor with such exquisite musicality. Take Fleming’s ‘All The King’s Men’ from Two Dancers for example, where any comforting old-world charm is undercut by savagely ironic lines like “you’re birthing machines / and let me show my darling what that means”.
“I think that the way society is set up, we can’t really fully explore real desire,” says Thorpe. “Society is set up to regulate and compartmentalise instinct. That probably sounds really highbrow, but it’s not meant to. I just think that songs can reveal things that can’t be revealed in the everyday. I think that there’s a real thrill in revealing those things, those forces; exploring the line between what’s safe and what’s unsafe, what’s right to sing and what’s wrong to sing.” Although less overtly salacious than its predecessor, a sense of risk unavoidably percolates beneath the glisteningly seamless surface of Smother, the lyrics veering between uncomfortably intimate and outright lascivious. “These songs are love songs,” says Thorpe, “but that love is not the pumping, glamorous all-or-nothing thing that a lot of love songs try and make it seem. We try to be human about it: you can love and hate someone at the same time. It’s about the push and pull of power.
“It’s a complex thing to be a man. There’s that unresolved element of what is expected of a man, that blend of being a gentleman as well as being a brute, caring as well as protective – I think there’s a strange dynamic going on there.”
First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011
Chatting from his East London flat ahead of the release of the group’s third album, Smother, Thorpe looks back on their initial splash with pride, attributing its more bizarre aspects to youthful naivety and a long, cloistered gestation in their isolated, North England town of Kendal. “There’s a sort of purity to it, in that it was completely unknowingly Dada and avant-garde. We thought we were making pop music,” he muses. “For a long time we were more embarrassed by [the weirder elements], but then we began to realise that those were the things that set us apart.”
Peopled by blokes who are into their booze and footy, Limbo careered between the abject and the divine, its hapless characters slaves to raging libidos and desires that exceed the bounds of what society may deem acceptable or even want to know about – take ‘The Old Dog’ as case in point, a simmeringly lush ballad about casual sex amongst the over-65s. For their follow-up Two Dancers (2009, made “in the aftermath of our dreams with the first record collapsing”), the group reigned in Thorpe’s wilder vocal excesses, giving greater weight to the gruff, moderating baritone of bass player Tom Fleming, while incorporating more electronic textures to produce a sleeker, more sophisticated sound.
This direction has found its logical extension on Smother, the aching carnality of ‘Plaything’ or glowing surface of ‘Albatross’ being reached through a need to “create something of beauty”, as the band challenged themselves with unfamiliar equipment and software to achieve the shimmering textures of the finished songs. “When I pick up a guitar, I know what it’s going to do,” says Thorpe. “I think there’s something rather boring about that. [But] use a sampler or software, and there’s an element of not knowing that I think is crucial for creating the atmosphere that we want to create … You have to be excited about what you’re doing, and one of the ways of doing that is to sort of go into the dark and see what you pull out.
“One of our big realisations was that beauty demands imperfection and demands a crudeness and a brutality sometimes, twinned with a lushness, y’know? It’s like the Photoshop syndrome, where the face has a few blemishes on it, a few pockmarks, but [when] you clear that face up, it’s no longer human … it’s just this generic face. There was a real sense of wanting to maintain those things that make it seem more vulnerable, show ourselves a bit more.”
Although the group was boosted by being signed to Domino early in their career, Thorpe is dubious about success within “the dirty machinery and filthy cogs that work behind the beautiful facade that is the music industry”. “I think we cannot be needy about what we do – it’s not a snatch and grab scenario,” he says. “We’re not the product of hype or sensationalism. Maybe that’s why it’s a slowly growing success; we’re aiming to make a long-range point, rather than make our point and disappear.”
As to what that point might be, try passing the steely-eyed social realism of, say, Mike Leigh, through an aesthetic sensibility more in keeping with Oscar Wilde or Rimbaud. There are few groups brave enough to have delved as deeply into the (sometimes intensely ugly) rents and fissures of male sexuality with such single-minded focus, nor with such exquisite musicality. Take Fleming’s ‘All The King’s Men’ from Two Dancers for example, where any comforting old-world charm is undercut by savagely ironic lines like “you’re birthing machines / and let me show my darling what that means”.
“I think that the way society is set up, we can’t really fully explore real desire,” says Thorpe. “Society is set up to regulate and compartmentalise instinct. That probably sounds really highbrow, but it’s not meant to. I just think that songs can reveal things that can’t be revealed in the everyday. I think that there’s a real thrill in revealing those things, those forces; exploring the line between what’s safe and what’s unsafe, what’s right to sing and what’s wrong to sing.” Although less overtly salacious than its predecessor, a sense of risk unavoidably percolates beneath the glisteningly seamless surface of Smother, the lyrics veering between uncomfortably intimate and outright lascivious. “These songs are love songs,” says Thorpe, “but that love is not the pumping, glamorous all-or-nothing thing that a lot of love songs try and make it seem. We try to be human about it: you can love and hate someone at the same time. It’s about the push and pull of power.
“It’s a complex thing to be a man. There’s that unresolved element of what is expected of a man, that blend of being a gentleman as well as being a brute, caring as well as protective – I think there’s a strange dynamic going on there.”
First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Destroyer - Kaputt
Dan Bejar’s work outside of The New Pornographers has never made many ripples on this side of the pond. More’s the pity, as Destroyer – the loose conglomerate of musicians that take the whimsical Vancouverite as their guiding star – boasts a back catalogue that sits easily amongst the best indie of the last decade. With Kaputt, Bejar has solidified his dark horse reputation with a tribute to the synth pop-pushers of yesteryear that’s part slickly-produced love letter, part withering reappraisal, but which is never less than totally absorbing.
Kaputt is not littered with the sounds of the 70s and 80s – rather, they form its basic building blocks, with Bejar taking the tropes of the era (right down to the synth washes and sax licks half-remembered from some late-night repeat), and reforming them into something new and remarkable. Thus the spirit of the Pet Shop Boys hangs over ‘Savage Night At The Opera’, while the bland inoffensiveness of Kenny G-style sax is harnessed in service of Bejar’s weirdly compelling musings on US race relations in ‘Suicide Demo For Kara Walker’.
Elsewhere, the seen-it-all sleaze of an Altman or Cassavetes film hangs heavily; ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Downtown’ conjure amphetamine-enhanced eyes meeting across dimly-lit dancefloors, over which Bejar seems to wander with aloof detachment, gesturing towards the absurdity of it all with an elegantly raised eyebrow. It’s nostalgic, in a drippingly ironic, Donnie Darko sort of way. ‘Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME / all sound like a dream to me’ he cries on the title track, at once lamenting and passing wry comment on a vanished time, while indulging in some of the music industry-kicking for which he is noted.
Lose yourself in this meticulously crafted melange.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 406, 11th April 2011
Kaputt is not littered with the sounds of the 70s and 80s – rather, they form its basic building blocks, with Bejar taking the tropes of the era (right down to the synth washes and sax licks half-remembered from some late-night repeat), and reforming them into something new and remarkable. Thus the spirit of the Pet Shop Boys hangs over ‘Savage Night At The Opera’, while the bland inoffensiveness of Kenny G-style sax is harnessed in service of Bejar’s weirdly compelling musings on US race relations in ‘Suicide Demo For Kara Walker’.
Elsewhere, the seen-it-all sleaze of an Altman or Cassavetes film hangs heavily; ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Downtown’ conjure amphetamine-enhanced eyes meeting across dimly-lit dancefloors, over which Bejar seems to wander with aloof detachment, gesturing towards the absurdity of it all with an elegantly raised eyebrow. It’s nostalgic, in a drippingly ironic, Donnie Darko sort of way. ‘Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME / all sound like a dream to me’ he cries on the title track, at once lamenting and passing wry comment on a vanished time, while indulging in some of the music industry-kicking for which he is noted.
Lose yourself in this meticulously crafted melange.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 406, 11th April 2011
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