Album Review: Cass McCombs - Wit's End

Wit’s End is the fifth full-length offering from Californian Cass McCombs, comprised of eight hushed compositions sewn together by sparse and jagged arrangements. Released through the ever-trustworthy Domino Records, it's a more downbeat affair than its predecessor, 2009's Catacombs, a record that landed the 33 year-old a wave of praise in recognition of “a unique talent”.
 
This time out, McCombs serves up a theatrically dark collection of heart-on-sleeve songs that opens with homesick-and-heartbroken ballad 'County Line'. Driven by a watery Wurlitzer keyboard and vocal inflections reminiscent of solo-era John Lennon, you get the feeling the nomadic veteran means every sullen word as he grieves and bellows lines like “On my way to you, Old County / Hoping nothing has changed...” – think an Americana-inflected ‘Jealous Guy’ for whatever this decade is being dubbed (‘The Tens’?!?). There's a calm familiarity to ‘The Lonely Doll’ which follows, sounding not unlike a nursery rhyme in places (“In a tribute to all things petite, pretty and sweet...”), albeit one of drunken fixation and unrequited lust.
 
The tone then shifts once more on ‘Buried Alive’, with dark harmonies and pulsating Mellotron tipping a hat towards that obscure minor-league band Lennon cut his teeth in; it's debatable whether The Fab Four would have been so bold as to serenade in hazy unison about a “stinking corpse I can smell but cannot see”, however. The world-weary drawl of Elliott Smith haunts ‘Hermit’s Cave’'s candid verses about confronting loneliness and despair head-on (“My catharsis was crushed by a wave / And my family I did crave...”). Album-closer ‘A Knock Upon The Door’, meanwhile, finds the singer boldly adopting a Leonard Cohen signature croon on what amounts to a brilliantly twisted carnival tale of a fallen artist and his muse, complete with some abrasive guitar tapping to represent the dreaded knock in the lyrics of the refrain; there's some well-thumbed Edgar Allen Poe on that bookshelf of his I’ll bet.
 
While McCombs succeeds in evoking semi-familiar characters in his voice from one song to the next, his sombre words and dark fairytales are his alone. He also excels at offsetting these morose and pained words against seemingly whatever style and colour he chooses, and this deceptively compact album is drawn from an impressively broad palette as a result. All this is matched by a steadfast refusal to linger in the same spot for too long, meaning nothing here outstays its welcome. Wit's End might just be the perfect record to bring you down this summer.