“I never lie in my songs,” Cass McCombs repeats on ‘I Never Dream About Trains’, a highlight from Interior Live Oak, his 11th album, which means he has certainly released over a hundred. Lest you take his words at face value, the odd specificity of the ensuing lyrics should elicit some skepticism (“I never dream about holding you tight/ On the sand in Pescadero”). What he sings on the previous song, though, is much closer to the truth: “I mean everything I say, or something quite like it.” The meaning of Interior Live Oak, a 12-song double album that follows 2022’s excellent but much more concise Heartmind, remains elusive, but McCombs manages to weave it all together, singing through a cast of unreliable narrators that only cement his own musical consistency and earnestness. They are dancers and cynics, real and imagined, brutally honest and spiritually truth-bearing. If they all, at times, seem buried in sleep, that’s because dreams, they say, have no lies to hide.
1. Priestess
One of two songs produced with Sam Owens (aka Sam Evian), ‘Priestess’ is an elegy – “of sorts,” the press bio aptly clarifies – for a friend, though the lyrics are as cryptically phantasmagoric as the hook is tight. “You saw that each one of us/ Are opaque as woven air/ Your dark humor no one could touch,” McCombs sings, capturing a whiff of it, but too intimate to be brutally honest.
2. Peace
Introduced by an exquisite acoustic riff and ending with a scruffy guitar solo, ‘Peace’ feels like a warm extension of ‘Priestess’ – both were advance singles – fixating on the word we use to bid farewell. It’s not so much about being fearless in the face of death so much as embracing fear amidst certainty.
3. Missionary Bell
With death still on his mind, McCombs gets more earnest and philosophical, his acoustic guitar playing simpler. As he lingers on the metaphor of “fathomless oceans,” his stately melody is the opposite of discordant, carrying you gently along. There are no bad songs on Interior Live Oak, but few as understated, and none better.
4. Miss Mabee
McCombs breaks the mood with a chugging, playful song that relies on the titular bit of wordplay (“Maybe Miss Mabee will, maybe Miss Mabee won’t”). Not much more to offer, but it does its job.
5. Home at Last
McCombs keeps things humorous with ‘Home at Last’, only this time it’s moodily self-deprecating. He’s aware of having to make a double album cohere instead of feeling like a disparate collection of songs, and it comes through even in the subtlest lyrical decisions: “Greeted by the hand of my maker/ I will shake it a lot/ Maybe some old streetlamp will blink once for me/ Maybe not.” Mr. Mabee, perhaps?
6. I’m Not Ashamed
Returning to unadorned, nostalgic sweetness, the narrator digs up a past without shame – a childhood where he’d climb on top of cherry trees, threatened by teeth-baring clouds – and projects it onto the present. If only the course of our lives could feel so weightless and pure; something’s lost in growing up, but maybe we can learn from it.
7. Who Removed the Cellar Door?
Widening the scope of the album, ‘Who Removed the Cellar Door?’ is quite a filmic interrogation of the titular prompt, with a strong melody that makes it easy to follow the narrative. Co-producer and longtime collaborator Chris Cohen helps create an ominous atmosphere, weaving the song around wafts of guitar and low-end fuzz.
8. A Girl Named Dogie
After ‘Miss Mabee’ we get ‘A Girl Named Dogie’, which maintains the previous song’s brooding atmosphere. The premise is familiar: the girl moved to New York “from somewhere hella plain,” though McCombs takes that line in a surreal direction by rhyming it with “and brought with her the rain.” Aided by Jason Quever, the song is sparser and drenched in reverb rather than layers of instrumentation, unexpectedly lighting up as if to illuminate the dark stage where the girl dreams herself a star. To match the glammy guitar solo he somehow finds space for, McCombs then starts yodelling. Just in case you’re starting to drift off.
9. Asphodel
Anchored by a driving guitar line and fluid drumming, ‘Asphodel’ is generous towards mysticism, neither ridiculing nor indulging in it. It revolves around a portal beneath San Francisco’s TransAmerica Pyramid leading to the city’s dark underworld – and where, a junkie informs the narrator, a flower grows in the dark. He juxtaposes fantastical details with incontrovertible truths: “The oak is alive by what is buried underneath.” His tone ultimately, once again, becomes elegiac, the flower harnessed for its figurative power, a spiritual warmth not even a cynic could deny.
10. I Never Dream About Trains
The suspiciously titled ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ is made all the more ironic by McCombs’ sensitive delivery: “Having cooled all desire/ I don’t require a thing from the Fates.” Maybe the latter line is true, but desire shows no signs of cooling. Maybe you can’t waltz loss away, but you can sort of wink at it.
11. Van Wyck Expressway
In another instance of smart sequencing, the desire is plainly revealed, if rather ambivalent: “I want something I can’t have/ I have something I don’t want.” ‘Van Wyck Expressway’ houses one of the album’s most mesmerizing melodies, swayed by fingerpicked guitar and cello that complement McCombs’ hushed vocals. “Human life is sleeping life,” he sings. Yet he can’t escape the vestiges of his own experience, laid out there in the dreams.
12. Lola Montez Danced the Spider Dance
Another cinematic song in the vein of ‘Who Removed the Cellar Door?’, this one stretches over seven minutes and centers on the Irish woman who became famous as a Spanish dancer (and whose list of lovers included pianist Franz Liszt and novelist Alexandre Dumas). Soundtracking her “final dance of desire,” the song is slow-moving but could use a few more textures to justify its length. Fictional as it may be, it inadvertently encapsulates the themes of the album in a couple of lines: “Unpleasant dreams, dark desires/ Poisoned spirits and flying embers.”
13. Juvenile
If ‘Miss Mabee’ was playful, ‘Juvenile’ is downright goofy, adopting the perspective of the adolescent as much as it is admonishing him. Primus catch a stray among the things that suck (everything), while the singer cautions against advertising that promotes the power of the new: “New map/ New crap/ New music/ That don’t slap.” Except Interior Live Oak, of course. McCombs knows he’s not saying anything new, but it still slaps.
14. Diamonds in the Mine
‘Diamonds in the Mine’ feels like a breath of fresh air at this point in the tracklist, lighthearted and comforting. Darkness is coming, he admits, but there’s no need to fear it because nothing stays the same. It’s a simple message, but Sam Owens does a wonderful job colouring in the spectral arrangement. “Glimmer adieu,” turns out, is just another way to say peace.
15. Strawberry Moon
The night has come, and as all lovers (our narrator included) gravitate towards the same titular beauty, McCombs offers them another waltz. When the city sleeps is when the music comes alive.
16. Interior Live Oak
If Interior Live Oak is a sleepy (complimentary) record, McCombs finishes it off with its rowdiest track, drunk on thunderous riffs and double-time drumming. If you’ve just woken up, it makes you want to fall back into the slumber, just to remember what the dreams were all about.
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