For Cass McCombs, it’s the song, not the singer. Over a career spanning more than two decades, this sly California-born troubadour has specialized in catchy tunes that shun easy categories, even as they flirt with familiar folk-pop tropes. Fascinating and exhausting, Interior Live Oak captures McCombs at full strength, exploring worlds of confusion and contradiction in 16 songs running a dense 74 minutes.
It's no reflection on the man’s talents as a performer to say McCombs’ greatest asset is his material. A charming, laid-back crooner who rarely raises his voice, he dresses up these inviting songs by adding subtle dashes of color, from psychedelic guitar to ghostly cello. His elegant melodies are the gateway to a collection of empathetic short stories about characters with a shaky grasp on reality.
“Priestess,” the languid opening tune, sets the mood with an ode to a troubled soul who was “dealt a rotten hand / n a highway in Colorado,” noting, “You saw that each one of us / Are opaque as woven air.” From there he profiles an elusive lover in the toe-tapping “Miss Mabee,” follows a loser’s listless retreat in “Home at Last,” observing, “This world is not for the weak,” and confronts an overwhelming convergence of natural disaster and human malice in the eerie “Who Removed the Cellar Door?”
