CASS McCOMBS : INTERIOR LIVE OAK

 

  1. Priestess
  2. Peace
  3. Missionary Bell
  4. Miss Mabee
  5. Home At Last
  6. I'm Not Ashamed
  7. Who Removed The Cellar Door
  8. A Girl Named Dogie
  9. Asphodel
  10. I Never Dream About Trains
  11. Van Wyck Expressway
  12. Lola Montez Danced The Spider Dance
  13. Juvenile
  14. Diamonds In The Mine
  15. Strawberry Moon
  16. Interior Live Oak

Label : Domino

Release Date : August 15, 2025

Length : 74:10

Review (Pitchfork) : Cass McCombs showed up late for the 20th century, like a party guest arriving as the host was finally slipping off her earrings. Then he wouldn’t leave. Over the 20-odd years since he emerged, a whispery Gen X folkie with a smart-assed streak and bowing bookshelves, he has become a lighthouse keeper for Boomer beacons: Lennon, Zevon, Dylan, Cohen, Nilsson, Newman, Young. “Priestess,” the solemnly funky opener of Interior Live Oak, glimmers with lime rickeys and wild horses, Ella Fitzgerald and John Prine, and the record often does little to dispel the illusion that it could have been made by Gordon Lightfoot in 1974. The things McCombs does so well are so familiar as to be almost invisible. Why they still seem so distinctly his is an enduring mystery. Maybe it’s just that he’s grown from being a precocious, pugnacious, quixotic songwriter to being a great one, and greatness makes inherited things seem invented. If the postwar pop pantheon still has any room, then McCombs should be a shoo-in on the evidence of Interior Live Oak. Though the album can be quite funny, it delivers the goods with no funny business—16 songs and not a throwaway among them, each an example of what works, rather than an experiment in what might. Songs with gorgeous melodies, alert arrangements, and brilliant rhetorical mechanisms; songs that make you wow and hmm. Character songs, story songs, bardic American songs that array demotic talk on mythic patterns, imprinting the same old changes with a lived texture that’s both unique and universal. It’s middle-aged in a good way, a record of settled tastes, with ambition and aptitude in equilibrium, and a perfect portal into his one-man canon. Going back to the well with old collaborators like Papercuts’ Jason Quever, McCombs has devised a style for Interior Live Oak that wafts and slithers—part breeze, part snake, with a slow and deliberate pace full of coiled energies. There’s Croce-style rococo folk, jangly fuzz rock, sparkly soul, and big-desert country, in a production style that emphasizes the haptic shapes of fingers pressing strings, especially in Brian Betancourt’s nomadic basslines. As ever, part of the music’s charm lies in its deceptive effortlessness and modesty. But this is belied by an astonishing outpouring of words that recalls peak Paul Simon in flavorful Americana and enigmatic scope. When a tune is good enough, a few good lyrics, with some filler and repetition, will often get you by. But McCombs has packed literature into these songs, from end to end. He starts with scintillating verbal surfaces that could maintain our interest alone, and occasionally do: “Miss Mabee” plays with the obvious homophone for three minutes of buoyant power pop. But usually, having set up a clever conceit, he keeps coming back at it from different angles, unpacking it into something vast and visionary or intimate and profound. The flickering gallop of “Peace” (“‘Peace’ is what we say/When we say goodbye”) made me notice the weight of that casual parting word in a way I hadn’t before, while the Tom Petty–like “Who Removed the Cellar Door?” demonstrates the intuitive leaps that enlarge the album, superimposing the edge of a flooded basement and the top of Niagara Falls in a great rush of regret. Of course a definitive Americana statement must include a song about a young woman moving from a small town to the big city, and here it’s “A Girl Named Dogie.” Crawling into the tunnels that secretly connect these songs, she reemerges in “Asphodel,” her journey to the underworld now stamped into legend. Later, as Lola Montez dances the spider dance, McCombs relentlessly cuts away context until the dance seems to fill the world, then become it. Alongside this character work, he has some gorgeous first-person moments, especially in the strands of untrustworthy denials that hold the lie at the center of “I Never Dream About Trains” so tenderly. But the main character is most often an unnamed you, or a series of yous, in a mood of elegiac tribute. It’s in this yearning second-person mode, in the emotional ratio of one to one, that McCombs really flashes his characters to life, as in “Priestess”: “You saw that each one of us/Are opaque as woven air/Your dark humor no one could touch/From experience no one could bear.” There’s stuff that hits like that on every song, though the lines have their greatest effect in the aggregate, including the finely measured spaces between them. The worst you once could say about McCombs was that he could be too clever by half, but by now he’s gotten many times wiser—even though there’s still a pure teenage heart beating somewhere in that breast of weathered oak. It bursts forth in the everybody-sucks anthem “Juvenile,” an oddly comforting palate-cleanser after the more oracular fare on this requiem for a dead century. Strange new world, same old Cass.

Review (OOR Magazine) : ‘I never lie in my songs / And I never dream about trains’, aldus Cass McCombs in I Never Dream About Trains. Ik denk dat ’t klopt, maar dat hij toch over treinen droomt. Zo is Cass McCombs: een mysterieuze en ietwat onbetrouwbare liedjesschrijver, die nu al tien albums lang rookgordijnen optrekt, vaak gepaard met ingenieuze melodieën. Ik kan na zestien jaar nog steeds mijn vinger niet achter de magie van You Saved My Life krijgen, maar het is voor mij een van die geliefde liedjes die altijd mee zullen gaan. En hoewel ik geen van zijn platen – ook deze niet – als ‘klassieker’ zou willen omschrijven, zitten er ook geen miskleunen bij. Deze keer krijgen we een dubbelaar, vijf kwartier lang. En waar voorgaande platen steeds vaker de muzikale diepte opzochten, gaan we nu vol de breedte in. Folky popliedjes, zestien stuks. Daar zitten weer geheimzinnige pareltjes tussen, zoals Home At Last of Strawberry Moon – die laatste met een achtergrondkoortje dat zo van The Band afkomstig lijkt. De ietwat flauwe humor is er ook nog steeds, zoals in het toepasselijk getitelde Juvenile, waarin hij grijnzend boodschappen als ‘Sociology is fake / ‘Cause society is fake’ de wereld in slingert. Alle dubbelaars (ja, ook die) gaan uiteindelijk gebukt onder hun eigen gewicht, maar dat is nu vaak juist het idee; meer is meer en precies gelijk aan de som der delen. Dat is bij deze plaat een ruime voldoende.

Review (MOJO) : When it comes to Cass McCombs, there’s a risk of complacency. Not on his side – on Interior Live Oak, the Californian singer-songwriter is as watchful as ever – but from that of the listener, who after 11 albums of cosmically questing music might simply expect nothing less than a line as richly allusive as, “I was working as a soda jerk/Listening to old Panthers’ stories/Over lime rickeys and tuna fish”, or a song that spins around 19th-century Irish-Bavarian proto-burlesque superstar Lola Montez. Steadily, however, Interior Live Oak becomes the kind of record it’s impossible to be casual about. After releasing 2024’s Seed Cake On New Year, a collection of unreleased music from around 2000, McCombs was inspired to return to his formative San Francisco stamping ground and record with his earliest collaborators (among them Jason Quever on drums and cello and bassist Chris Cohen). There are startling moments: the title track’s D&D blues-rock, for example, The Groundhogs doing The Tempest in a nasty basement; or Juvenile’s ice-rink keyboards, McCombs ennobling and mocking adolescence (“You suck/I suck/Primus sucks”). Other songs, though, creep up more subtly, such as Miss Mabee’s Elliott Smith hush, or Peace’s heartbreaking Go-Betweens valediction. The other good reason to resist complacency is McCombs as the unreliable narrator’s unreliable narrator. His music might have an easy way with a loping, looping riff or motif, but it can often be a trap. “I mean everything I say,” he sings on Asphodel, “or something quite like it.” On the millpond piano of I Never Dream About Trains – a homage to Robyn Hitchcock, who narrated a trailer for 2019’s Tip Of The Sphere – he repeats “I never lie in my songs”, a line that immediately suggests lying. “I never dream about holding you,” he sings, “on the sand in Pescadero/While the herons dive into the waves.” Like Dan Bejar or Bill Callahan, McCombs adeptly slips between realities. Those who find themselves in his songs can expect to be transformed, no longer just lover, friend, chance encounter, but an epic hero, a warrior, a creature in the throes of metamorphosis. “You slapped the Devil across his face/He puked up ice and black bile,” sings McCombs on Priestess, a scuffed Steely Dan elegy for a friend. On Asphodel, he encounters a “junkie on Leavenworth” who insists that an underworld portal exists under San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid. The Asphodel Meadows were the afterlife destination for ordinary, “mediocre” Ancient Greeks, a budget version of five-star Elysium. Home At Last indicates where McCombs thinks he belongs: “Unremarkable in every way/In my time, forgotten/On my tombstone, let it say/ Here lies no one.” It might suit McCombs to play the elusive songwriter, adrift in a world taking him for granted, but unfortunately, while he keeps making records as excellent as this, Asphodel will have to wait.