On a cool January evening in East Atlanta, Baltimore-based singer/songwriter Cass McCombs performed at The Earl. Not knowing much about McCombs from the outset, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Upon leaving, I still wasn’t quite sure what to say. Here’s my attempt.
Rightly or wrongly, first impressions are important, and I felt like McCombs made a mistake by opening his show with the pretty but plodding “Prima Donna,” off 2009’s Catacombs. The song, with its overwrought, somewhat whiny lyrics and barely-there percussion, ambled along without anything that even attempted to grab and reel in the audience. Whatever the reason for this decision, it felt misguided to me, and didn’t make me excited about being where I was, preparing to experience what I was about to experience.
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| Photo © Nick Rallo |
Things certainly improved as the show progressed, but it felt like a painfully slow process. This is not to say that the music was unpleasant; in fact in was quite soothing and lovely at times, but it just never wowed me, even when it felt like it was supposed to. The band itself seemed suppressed, especially at the beginning, with nothing to play but repetitive, slightly boring hooks while McCombs crooned into the microphone with a broody face and tousled brown hair parted straight down the middle. I guess it boils down to the fact that McCombs’ voice seemed to be what was emphasized here, and nothing about it really moved me. It felt devoid of passion but also devoid of that desperate desolation that makes a voice like Elliott Smith’s (an artist that McCombs has been compared to more than once) so spellbinding.
As they strolled through tracks from an extensive decade of discography—from 2011’s “Robin Egg Blue” to 2004’s “AIDS in Africa”— McCombs’ five-piece band had the look, feel, and sound of a nerdy 90’s stoner band transported into 2012. There was a moody, Slacker-esque white boy earnestness about the whole performance that seemed dated in this decade, despite the pop-culture lyrical references to Facebook and Bradley Manning, the American soldier who was charged for “aiding the enemy” by passing classified information to WikiLeaks in 2011. I certainly appreciated the tribute to Manning, but the style of the song (aptly titled “Bradley Manning”) felt unsubtle and a bit contrived.
So did tracks like “Love Thine Enemy,” the opener from last year’s Humor Risk. The song’s simple melody served only to highlight McCombs’ rather cloying and monotonous directive: “love thine enemy / but hate the lack of sincerity.” Okay, if you insist.
The band’s drummer, dressed in a blue striped rugby shirt that stylistically set him apart from the rest of the band, was the only guy on stage who seemed determined to keep me awake, despite the fact that he was forced to satisfy himself with endearingly spastic head nods in order to keep time between the slow shuffley beats he was assigned to play. O loveable drummer, you seemed capable of so much more!
The keyboardist did get a chance for a passionately drawn-out solo that was much appreciated by the audience, but it was one of the rare moments of vigor in an otherwise drowsy evening. Even the rollicking Allman Brothers “Ramblin’ Man” outro that came near the end felt cut short, as though the band had been under strict orders not to upstage McCombs’ vocals.
Am I being cynical? Probably. Maybe I was looking for something that I should’ve known not to expect here, but the overall performance left me with a pesky sense of lack that I couldn’t shake. In the end, I simply could not see what set Cass McCombs apart from all the other moody, scraggly-haired singer/songwriters out there. And in a world full of moody, scraggly-haired singer/songwriters, I think that’s important.
