CASS McCOMBS: BIG WHEEL & OTHERS (2013)
1) Sean I; 2) Big Wheel; 3)
Angel Blood; 4) Morning Star; 5) The Burning Of The Temple, 2012; 6) Brighter!;
7) There Can Be Only One; 8) Name Written In Water; 9) Joe Murder; 10)
Everything Has To Be Just-So; 11) It Means A Lot To Know You Care; 12) Dealing;
13) Sooner Cheat Death Than Fool Love; 14) Satan Is My Toy; 15) Sean II; 16)
Home On The Range; 17) Brighter!; 18) Untitled Spain Song; 19) Sean III; 20)
Honesty Is No Excuse; 21) Aeon Of Aquarius Blues; 22) Unearthed.
I wonder if I should or should not go the
«ambitious is always good» route here? After all, it is not true that this last decade is completely free of grand,
larger-than-thou musical gestures: from Arcade Fire and all the way to Kanye
West, people are still trying to bite off more than they can chew, even as
natural selection causes their jaws to keep shrinking with each new generation.
And after a string of serious musical disappointments, could it be the right
decision for Cass McCombs to gamble it all on a sprawling, two-disc collection
of twenty songs in half a dozen different musical styles, presenting his own,
contemporary mega-take on Americana?..
As usual, the absolute majority of other
people's positive opinions that I have seen focus almost exclusively on the
lyrics. And they are really good lyrics, yes: the man is now capable even of
finding a non-clichéd way to deliver a sermon on the age-old problem of peace,
love, and mutual understanding (ʽEverything Has To Be Just-Soʼ), let alone
continuing to find fresh metaphors to lay on the age-older problem of
him-and-her (ʽSooner Cheat Death Than Fool Loveʼ) or, incidentally, deliver
some of the most viciously offensive anti-religious (anti-clerical, to be
accurate) chastushkas to come out of the progressive camp (ʽSatan Is My Toyʼ),
though you have to listen really carefully to get it. And you have to listen
even more carefully, sometimes, to
understand if he is using redneck imagery directly and scornfully, or as a
metaphor for something completely different altogether (ʽBig Wheelʼ). Anyway,
the guy continues to be a good poet...
...but does he continue to be a good musician?
That's a far more difficult question. Despite the sprawling length of this
collection, it manages to avoid both the unending lethargy of Wit's End and the simplistic repetitive
crudeness of Humor Risk. With a
couple tolerable exceptions, the songs do not seriously overstay their welcome,
run along at steady, energetic rootsy tempos, and occasionally feature vocal
and instrumental pop hooks, so it's not really much of a chore sitting through
all of this in one go. And, as somewhat inferior, derivative resuscitations of
age-honored musical styles, they work all right. ʽBig Wheelʼ will appeal to
anybody who'd like to know how Chuck Berry would sound when played by Fairport
Convention (but with musicianship that would probably make Richard Thompson
cringe). ʽAngel Bloodʼ and a whole bunch of other country-tinged tracks here
will warm the heart of all Gram Parsons fans (on the whole, I'd say that Gram
Parsons could all but be proclaimed this record's mascot). ʽJoe Murderʼ is Joy
Division bleakness peppered with avantgarde sax blasts à la original King Crimson. ʽDealingʼ and a couple more acoustic
ballads recycle the old Donovan / ʽDear Prudenceʼ chord sequences... all in
all, these reworked influences are okay, and it is clear that Cass is not
interested in pushing any boundaries — he just wants himself some tasteful
backdrops for his statements.
Which, much as I am trying to fight this,
inevitably brings us back to the lyrics and the whole conceptual shenanigan —
especially since the album is introduced (and then twice more interrupted)
with bits of dialog sampled from the 1969 documentary Sean, a series of dialogs between a filmmaker and a 4-year old kid
raised by his hippie parents in Haight-Ashbury (apparently, Cass had been a fan
of the documentary for quite a long time, since some of his songs were used for
the soundtrack of a follow-up, Following
Sean, as early as 2005). Given that the dialog reveals the little boy to
be a grass smoker, a police-hater, and a God denier, you could say that Big Wheel & Others revolves around
some sort of anti-establishment frame, but Cass is too smart and too hip to
come out with any unambiguous judgements... too
smart and hip, really, so much so that, ultimately, the record still suffers
from a certain emotional vacuum. Is he angry? Is he sad? Is he from another
planet? Is he just telling it like it is? Does he agree with Sean on all the
philosophical points the boy makes? Does he eat grass, or smoke it? Who knows?
Anyway, I'd be totally wasted if I started
waxing philosophical over all these songs, so let's just skip over to the last
one — you know, the coda, the finale, the denouement, the unveiling of The
Truth, whatever, and hey, it's called ʽUnearthedʼ, so it might really reveal
something. What have we got here? Acoustic, slightly lo-fi, slow ballad,
"it won't be too long, it won't be too long", so there's some sort of
blind prophet apocalypse vibe... "I moved 75 thousand tons of earth with
my teeth... I met a toad that belched up a bottle" (this is sung a bit
close to the motif of ʽA Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fallʼ), "and in the bottle
was a note, a note I knew you wrote... how come you keep your true feelings so
well hidden?". Uh... that's it?
This is how our long journey ends? This is why I had to sit through nine
minutes of ʽEverything Has To Be Just-Soʼ and seven minutes of ʽHome On The
Rangeʼ? Boy, what a downer.
The biggest problem with the album is that it
is long, it is meandering, it is trying to tell us something important — and
it never really seems to understand what it is trying to tell us. It's one of
those respectable, but wasted efforts where the smart artist outsmarts himself
by focusing too much on his own enigma. On the bright side of things, it is a
sort-of-timeless statement that is in no way bound hands-and-feet to the year
or decade in which it was released, so who knows? perhaps, in fifty years time
or less, critics will dig it out, dust it off, and declare it a major masterpiece
that was way ahead of its time, a time when reviewers either praised it without
understanding it (like the Pitchfork people) or simply confessed to not
understanding it (like yours truly). But my guess is that even fifty years from
now, Big Wheel & Others will, at
the very best, be one of those albums that everybody tips a hat to for the
effort but nobody really listens to because it all kind of seems more
impressive on paper than in the air.
"people are still trying to bite off more than they can chew, even as natural selection causes their jaws to keep shrinking with each new generation." That's going in my book of all-time Old Fart Rock N Roll Axioms. Never have I read a better assessment of 21st-Century Musical Ennui.
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