Cass McCombs – Humor Risk
Domino
Cass McCombs conducts interviews only by letter, sings faintly bitter songs about his hometown folk and leaves helpful suggestions for music journalists on album promo sleeves. ‘PLEASE READ LYRICS’, instructs his latest — such are the enormous dimensions of his hat.
Since signing with Domino in 2003, the exponential trajectory of McCombs’ ego-balloon has been intriguing: for starters, the sleeve for underrated, lower-fi debut A bore nary a lyric sheet nor passive-aggressive plea, only the letter ‘A’ and some weird fly things on a plain background. Perhaps his next will come inked with the legend ‘WRITE OFF AT YOUR PERIL, PHILISTINE!’, but this much we know: the man pens a sweet story.
Remarkably, this is the sixth LP from California’s most prolific former janitor, truck driver and stable boy, making it his second of 2011 after April’s Wit’s End. And while in many respects Humor Risk proves a paragon of nuanced timing, wit and delivery (check ‘Robin Egg Blue’’s spine-tinglingly mysterious assertion that “the field needed to be burned”), McCombs remains something of an underwhelming presence; failing to leave the telltale thumbprint traces on his work that make the best singer-songwriters so compelling.
More promising, however, is his newfound knack for penning concrete narratives whose true meanings are not only debatable, but debate-encouraging. Indeed, a certain evolution juddered suddenly into motion on album four, Catacombs, wherein Cass debuted a kind of weighty sparseness — both musical and lyrical — which has come to define McCombs mk II, mixing black humour with the loose ambiguity of Raymond Carver’s short stories. Nonetheless, as on Catacombs, the prose occasionally feels stilted, and the poignancy blunted, unfortunately laying the table for another wilfully careless record that’s easier to admire than love.
That said, there is much to admire. When McCombs stretches the word “he” — as in “Daniel was a good guy but a saint he ain’t” from side-two wig-out ’Mystery Mail’ — the stomach lurches. But, quite aside from being his second album-length outing of the year, it’s Humor Risk’s experimental nature that means the record was always unlikely to come up trumps — at least not consistently: ‘Meet Me in the Mannequin Gallery’, in particular, comes off like a scrapped Kafka chapter and earns high marks in the seems-faintly-pointless stakes.
Overall resembling a slightly beige take on Velvet Underground and Nico, Humor Risk is hardly the ashtray-full of Wit’s End’s leftover joke-butts you might’ve imagined. But equally, it suggests a glass of potential still left half-empty for the boy McCombs, and you get the impression his bold risks perhaps aren’t quite paying dividends. Jazz Monroe
