Cass McCombs: Wit's End (2011)

(Domino)

I'm excited for this Californian singer-songwriter's forthcoming sixth album, Humor Risk, as the songs being issued to promote it show an artist working at a much higer level than on the majority of his prior work, despite a good deal of acclaim afforded him since he surfaced around 2002. I was excited enough by the material Domino sent me that I reversed an earlier decision to ignore the previous record from the prolific McCombs, Wit's End, released earlier this year.

Unfortunately, this record ends up reminding me why I've always been a bit of a dissenter about McCombs, as he falls into a lot of negative stereotypes I have about folkies in general. McCombs also here welcomes the currently in-vogue circa 1986 MOR production of the likes of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, and even though his talent is clearly leaps and bounds above the similarly watered-down Kurt Vile, his work on this album meanders and collapses, pretty as it is.

McCombs has spent his entire career on the cusp of attaining the widespread success of the likes of Iron & Wine, Alexi Murdoch, and Sufjan Stevens. He hasn't missed for lack of talent -- there is a real and evocative voice there, it just gets locked in too-consistently moody dirges that frequently stretch for seven to eight minutes. With any luck, given the extra-loud praise afforded this release, Humor Risk will mark the point when I finally break past my prejudices and fall for his work. We'll find out in less than a month.

Miles Davis: Relaxin' (1958)

(Prestige)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This wonderful LP collects some of the best material recorded in two legendary sessions by the peerless Miles Davis Quintet in 1956. Despite its luxurious sound and adorably calm art deco cover, this music is anything but complacent. Davis' most celebrated album, with a subsequent band, is of course Kind of Blue; the contrast is fascinating because Blue consisted of performances by a band who'd never played those songs before. On the four albums from the incredibly fruitful '56 Quintet sessions, we're getting utter precision: the band knew these songs back to front, having gathered them from their live repertoire at this point. So if Kind of Blue gives us art and detail and beauty copped from feeling through new ideas, this is pure virtuosity from a supremely well-practiced unit.

And the reason that's so interesting is that in sonic terms, you'd assume the opposite, which speaks to Davis' magic skill as arranger -- you get a feeling of genuine scrappiness and fascinated fixation on Relaxin', despite the overwhelming beauty of Davis and John Coltrane's solos throughout. "If I Were a Bell" has such a splendidly celebratory feeling it seems to jump off the record, opening with the intense concentration on those lovely first notes that proceed into eight minutes of preoccupations with the song's possibilities, something that would lead to both Davis' performing it live for the remainder of his career and to the formation of the Guys and Dolls showtune as a jazz standard. But it's the version of Sonny Rollins' "Oleo" that seems the most stunning showcase of the band's interplay, opening the second half with six minutes of bliss. Still, the entire record reflects a perfect concentration of mood and genius. As befits its title, it works well enough as background music, but pay close attention and the seduction will be complete, the cohesion impressive (even if Walkin' remains the masterpiece of this group of albums, "Walkin'" the top song of the collection).

Hard bop as a genre peaks here, the moody sense of knocked-off magic a complete triumph, and really the Quintet is astoundingly thorough. They exercise so many of the possibilities of the music they're playing here that there was scarcely anywhere left to go with this branch of jazz afterward; Davis was always restless, always moving, and there is perhaps nothing else in his catalog so open, so inviting as these hard bop Quintet records, so they are to be savored. It's always a thrill to hear Davis and Coltrane together, but mention must be made of Red Garland's superb piano work (particularly on the two October '56 cuts that close the record), Philly Joe Jones' drums, and especially Paul Chambers' momentous bass playing. The Miles Davis Quintet was a truly complete band, and we're lucky to have so much of their work on record.

[SEE ALSO:]
Birth of the Cool (1950)

Feist: Metals (2011)

(Interscope)

Read my Metro Times review.

Can I think a record is both incredibly brave and incredibly disappointing?

The Walkmen: Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2002)

(Star Time International)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Though the core of their sound, evoking gritty late '70s NYC, remains the same, the Walkmen have ended up being a very different band from the one suggested by their 2002 debut album. Just for a start, look at their best song and for my money the best song of the 2000s, "The Rat," an angry kicking against whatever darkness, whatever loneliness may surround -- a lifting up through pounding drums and unceasing guitar. Or look at their extraordinary albums of 2008 and 2010 respectively, You and Me and Lisbon, and their Van Morrison-like subservience to unkempt emotion and awestruck beauty. I tend to think of the Walkmen now as a band that captures triumph, that describes picking oneself up to reach adulthood and maturity and happiness and all the conflicts those things create, all the challenges time itself can't help but throw in. But on the very first track of their first album, "they're winning." I don't know if it's my imagination or what, but on Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, I feel like the Walkmen are opening their career in a fatalistic mindset, they're winning and we've been had and wake up, stop talking. These are the sounds of someone who's given up.

I don't know for sure, of course. I don't know what might have inspired the remnants of Jonathan Fire*Eater, once the great white hope of DreamWorks and one of the most hyped bands of the late '90s, to recruit Hamilton Leithauser and Peter Bauer and wail out "The headaches and worries / And crying and bills to pay / How could they keep it up so long?" It was probably the mood of those times. Even before 9/11, I remember the early 2000s as a morbidly depressed period, as the beginning of a tragic decline to our national character. A million things personal and non could've been going through the Walkmen's heads back then.

But to me, this album is about my dad, who died this weekend. It's funny because he would've hated the way Hamilton sings -- he didn't like throaty, tune-challenged vocalists and really loathed Bob Dylan in particular -- but that's what is suggested to me by not just the words and the defeatist mood but the music itself, the lonesome and sad distance that makes me think of how little I finally understood my father, and how much I was able to move past that (not enough). I knew the warm person I knew as a child was there somewhere, but increasingly far away from me, like those distant guitars here that you can sense have a chiming, delicate sweetness but seem to be spilling out from another room, where they are singing to some other party. The way some of the songs never quite seem to start, and the mood of waiting for a release that never quite occurs.

When I think really carefully about what my dad never got to do and the physical therapy he didn't want to participate in and the time he drove doped up to Wilmington to empty a storage unit and didn't speak to anyone, just felt for some reason that it was important, I think of "Wake Up" -- the pounds of disappointment -- and "The Blizzard of '96," so strange and mysterious but somehow human and familiar, somehow a shadow of something vividly remembered. I wonder about that drive, I wonder what during those two hours coming and going he listened to on the radio. I wonder if it rained and whether he put on the wipers. I wonder if as he slept at my grandfather's house that night he knew it would be the last time he saw the city in which he grew up, if he suspected he only had a few weeks left. I think he probably did.

The suffering is over now. We're all left with dreaming and remembering, wondering what we could've done differently because we all -- the three of his children -- have fallen away from him in recent years, and was it our fault or his or no one's? Was it just the way people form and trail off when they've built their own lives? He knew my brother and I turned out all right and were happy; I wish he could have felt the same about my sister but somehow it's like these songs (which she wouldn't like either) are about her too. And then I think, the surrealism of losing a parent, of the unit of support that was so constantly there for so many years, and this album's title track seems so precisely to convey that. Even just the languid sadness of the cover art, I see my dad in that too. I see how scared he was, how out of time he felt, how much he wanted things different.

And in all of this I hear his disappointment. Not in me, though I suppose it's possible he felt that, but in the world. I hear that in the legendary "We've Been Had," a song that I heard the Walkmen perform in an elegiac reprise this past January, before the cancer began to really eat away at Dad. The hauntingly pretty rolls of the piano, and the way Hamilton takes the melody far above its technical structure, just letting the song sing him -- those are hints of the afternoon sun, the peace that might be in the future. Its words so accurately describe the things I wish might have carried him through.

I see myself change as the days change over
I hear the songs and the words don't change
I write them out of the book right there
We've been had, you say it's over
Sometimes I'm just happy I'm older
We've been had, I know it's over
Somehow it got easy to laugh out loud

He was so far out of my world in a way. He had a different immediate family now. They were the ones who were with him. But I can think of him in my own way. I can understand what always hurt him, and what hurt him at the end, and what I hope finally let him go and gave him relief. Tonight I think of him in this music and try to measure it all and make sure I can be at peace with the end. Tomorrow I'll remember the good things, but today the ups and downs and all of it. Today I let the questions I'll never properly answer float around and I do my best to be silly and nice and live my own life but I won't forget them. And tomorrow we don't go on as if nothing happened, we just "go on."

[SEE ALSO:]
Lisbon (2010)

Washed Out: Within and Without (2011)

(Sub Pop)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times Blogs.

Alexander "Skip" Spence: Oar (1969)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This record's primary purpose is to generate simultaneously a desire to hug it and a recoiling, creeping disgust -- so given my taste for Alex Chilton's solo work and the Beach Boys' Love You, not to mention Daniel Johnston and (why not) Nick Drake, this would seem a dream album for me. And in one way, I'm amazed that I have managed not to hear it until I was 27, because it's like ear candy to me: dissonant, hyperemotional acoustic psychodrama unfettered by overarranging, with croakingly complete but vague, barely-there songs. Skip Spence was of course the guy who came at a bandmate from Moby Grape with an ax while on a particularly heavy acid trip; upon being freed from the resultant stint in a psychiatrick ward, he showed up at a studio and recorded this lovable slice of shambolic beauty. "Diana" and "War in Peace" are the sound of a broken man, full of the wailing coos that would mark Big Star's "Kanga Roo" a few years later. Say this for a handicap of the sort that addled Spence: it removes all blockage to the kind of wordless desperation that is flawlessly captured on Oar; we don't just recognize this sadness, we feel it.

Part of what separates Oar from its desolate descendants is that its classic rock connection goes far beyond Spence's career lineage. The blues rock elements that built up to the ax-wielding moment are easily audible on "Little Hands" -- ethereal and ghostly, yes, but somehow rootsy as well, an agreeable call forward to Iron & Wine and Great Lake Swimmers, though more unhinged than either. If that's too subtle for you, "Books of Moses" hammers it home. But Spence here exhibits none of the obnoxious machismo that's dated a lot of traditional rock from this period. It helps that the sound and production are a stunningly proficient evocation of a mood. That's the key. As hyperactively eccentric singer-songwriters go, Spence lacks the melodic sense of Brian Wilson and the personable warmth of Alex Chilton, even Daniel Johnston's eagerness to please, but he can wring feeling out of these sparse numbers that Cat Stevens and James Taylor could've only dreamed about. Either would kill for the casual cabaret of "Lawrence of Euphoria," the unsentimentally delicate folk-rock of "Weighted Down," the effortless deja vu of "Dixie Peach Promenade" -- neither would have been able to glean anything honest from them the way Spence does.

Better yet, this rant is not artfully delicate or pretty -- not at all beautiful in a typical singer-songwriterly way; like a Terrence Malick film, its grand emotions come from its rawness and sincerity. It is lovely, it shimmers (see the glorious "Cripple Creek"), and it makes its points with agreeable brevity, the songs fading as soon as they've made their point satisfactorily. Spence's vocals are also ideal for the sonic setting he's concoted, the strain you can sense in his lyrics and singing only making "Broken Heart" that much more convincing and priceless. Maybe this is all extraordinary and prophetic by accident, but it's no small feat that even now, a 1969 album can make a seasoned follower of fringe rock music as uncomfortable as the splendid, otherworldly closing tangent "Grey/Alto" does, to say nothing of the out-of-time "Margaret Tiger Rug."

How refreshing that oar is unembarrassed at its off-kilter sentimentality and playfulness, even at relatively conventional intervals like the naked, stark Simon & Garfunkel guitar move "All Come to Meet Her." Were the album's emotions -- which tend to reflect the confusion that one would expect to haunt a guy just out of rehabilitation --not as unorthodox as its sonics, it would be a home run. As it is, it's very very close.

Wilco: The Whole Love (2011)

(Anti-)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

BTW, the vinyl edition of this is one of the nicest new LPs I've ever purchased. Worth the money.