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 develop into a lighthouse keeper for Boomer beacons: Lennon, Zevon, Dylan, Cohen, Nilsson, Newman, Younger. “Priestess,” the solemnly funky opener of Inside Stay Oak, glimmers with lime rickeys and wild horses, Ella Fitzgerald and John Prine, and the report usually 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 an incredible 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 Stay Oak. Although the album may 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, somewhat than an experiment in what would possibly. Songs with beautiful melodies, alert preparations, and sensible 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songs, story songs, bardic American songs that array demotic discuss on mythic patterns, imprinting the identical outdated adjustments with a lived texture that’s each distinctive and common.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Going again to the properly with outdated collaborators like Papercuts’ Jason Quever, McCombs has devised a method for Inside Stay Oak that wafts and slithers—half breeze, half snake, with a sluggish and deliberate tempo stuffed with coiled energies. There’s Croce-style rococo people, jangly fuzz rock, sparkly soul, and big-desert nation, in a manufacturing model 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 remembers peak Paul Simon in flavorful Americana and enigmatic scope.
When a tune is sweet sufficient, just a few good lyrics, with some filler and repetition, will usually get you by. However McCombs has packed literature into these songs, from finish to finish. He begins with scintillating verbal surfaces that would keep our curiosity alone, and sometimes 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/After we say goodbye”) made me discover the burden of that informal parting phrase in a means 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 an incredible rush of remorse.