Cass McCombs < Jason Mraz? A Discussion of Strummy Songwriters

While this is, ostensibly, a review of Cass McCombs’s new album Catacombs, it will end up being a rundown of the guy-with-guitar-and-heart-on-his-sleeve genre, a genre that’s getting a little too bloated of late. Someone needs to sift the wheat from the chaff, and, unfortunately, Cass McCombs is firmly in the chaff.

I can sum up Catacombs for you in one word: boring. Or two words: fucking boring. How about three? Really fucking boring. You get the idea. Moving on.

There are several variations on the dude/guitar/singer/songwriter formula, some of which are all right and some of which are annoying as hell. Jason Mraz, while still a more compelling listen than Cass McCombs (it pains me to say that), traffics in the gimmicky word-play, gee-look-how-fast-I-can-spew-semiclever-lyrics sort of singing/songwriting. So, needless – but still fun – to say, Jason Mraz really sucks. This doesn’t seem to stop people from adoring him, much like another strummy bum I know named Jack Johnson who is my generation’s Jimmy Buffet (those of you who have read Bollocks! even one time know there is no way that can be a compliment). Jack Johnson did a bunch of songs for the Curious George soundtrack and it still impresses me that he escaped playing the titular character as well.

And I’m not merely complaining about the genre here because there are good singer/songwriters out there. They’re just hard to find sometimes. M. Ward is pretty awesome, largely because he writes good melodies and has a deliciously old-school sound to him that I really dig. Elliott Smith was one of the best of the stummy bunch, and is probably largely responsible for people like Cass McCombs and this one uber-emo kid I saw at a small theatre in Sherman Oaks last week (I’m not gonna out the kid here, but he was hilariously, embarrassingly bad – I literally laughed through his set).

Technology has served to somewhat democratize the music business in recent years because we’ve reached a point now where anyone with a laptop and a halfway decent microphone can make an album. The one big downside to this is that anyone with a laptop and a halfway decent microphone can make an album. It doesn’t mean everyone should. I can’t speak for McCombs’s other albums, but with Catacombs, he’s crafted easily one of the ten most boring albums I’ve ever heard (and my parents listen to Kenny G for dog’s sake). So if you find your normal listening choices a little too exciting, why not try Catacombs?

McCombs’s biggest mistake is assuming that long and winding melodies will compensate for the one-dimensionality of the record as a whole. In his case, the melodies are all delivered at a near-whisper (I know Iron and Wine does this but the key difference is that Iron and Wine is, generally, awesome) and in half the songs, they’re repeated well past the five minute mark (incidentally, I don’t have a problem with songs being longer than five minutes. But, if you’re going over five, your song should be at least as awesome as The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” or LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”, which surpasses seven minutes and is still one of the best songs of the decade. Yes, the whole fucking decade). While Pitchfork finds this “aurally hypnotic,” I would like to suggest they’re confusing hypnosis with coma-inducing boredom.

Elliott Smith was one of the few singer/songwriters I can think of who could whisper his way through most of his songs and not sound like a tool, and that’s largely due to a lyrical skill that your McCombses, Mrazes, & Johnsons couldn’t touch in a lifetime of trying. Listen to “Say Yes” if you doubt that shit. In fact, listen to all of Either/Or and XO if you doubt that shit. And, if you doubt that shit after that, you’re quite possibly hopeless.

There’s a certain point where I feel like Cass McCombs is too committed to the shtick of being a lo-fi, quiet, “mysterious,” singer/songwriter and that’s a death trap for innovation. Tom Waits realized this in the early 80s  when he got tired of being the wisecracking, boozed up, jazz/country piano man and started making some of the most interesting (and awesome) music of that entire decade. And yet, I somehow doubt you’ll hear much about Frank’s Wild Years on I Love the 80s. Why? Because, as stated so many times before, VH1 knows fuckall about good music. (And, in a way, Tom Waits is the king of all the singer/songwriters – I’m not one to agree with the Pitchfork kids much, but I have a hard time disputing their assertion that “You will not write a better song than Tom Waits. Period.”)

Some of you may want to cry “sexist” at me for not including any women in this singer/songwriter rundown, but here’s why I didn’t: generally speaking, the women do it better than the boys. Neko Case would roughly fit the singer/songwriter mold here and Middle Cyclone is a fucking masterpiece. If Catacombs could compare to it, I’d give Cass McCombs an actual review instead of using his album as a springboard to complaining about his chosen genre.  (I just envisioned sitting the two albums on a table together and watching Neko leap off that car’s hood and chopping Catacombs in half. Kathleen Edwards is also superior to many of her male counterparts, though she seems to get a lot less press. Ani DiFranco is not only better than Jason Mraz but I’m pretty sure she could beat him in a fight (also, she’s one of the most truly, committedly, and successfully independent artists out there right now – so independent, in fact, that Pitchfork doesn’t seem inclined to review her albums). And I know she’s been quiet for a while, but I’ve got pleny of love for Beth Orton as well.

So here’s the thing, I think: the solo singer/songwriter field is littered with mediocrity because it’s so easy to do. You buy a guitar, figure out some chords, and then pour your soul out onto a piece of paper. You weld the words to a melody you can repeat with your modest vocal range, you repeat it until someone listens, you make an album, and some asshole in Los Angeles spends a thousand words and the better part of a morning completely shitting on your precious art. On a long enough timeline, we can all be singers in cafes and, no matter how shitty our songs are, we can find at least one person who thinks we’re so deep. But let’s not do that, okay? Please?

The Boy Least Likely To Impress Me

Admittedly, a large portion of the music I like could be, maybe possibly, filed under the header “Indie.” And here’s why I hate that: it’s meaningless as a genre, for starters. It’d be better to call it “music the radio doesn’t play because the radio sucks” (unless it’s Minnesota’s 89.3 The Current). The Boy Least Likely To is another reason I try to just list bands I like instead of saying I like “Indie” music. Because I’m afraid, deathly afraid, that someone will hear that I like indie stuff and think I like Sufjan Stevens and The Boy Least Likely To.

I can’t even remember why I thought I would like The Law of the Playground. Because I really don’t. It’s actually almost everything about indie I hate. Childlike innocence I can deal with, but The Law of the Playground is so prancingly aw-shucks that it makes me want to puke. It’s an album that would scream, “Look at me! I’m innocent and cute!” except that it doesn’t scream anything ever. It just whispers everything to you and waits for you to find it precious. Well, I don’t.

I was discouraged by album opener “Saddle Up,” because it made me ask, out loud when only the dog could hear me, “Are they serious?” Who is this music for? My niece might dig this shit, but I’m guessing it’s too cute even for her (kid likes pirate movies and Wolf Parade for dog’s sake). By the time I got t0 “When Life Gives Me Lemons, I Make Lemonade,” I stopped.

That’s right. I stopped. I know I say that I listen to every album a bunch of times before I write about it and that’s almost always true. But I couldn’t get past the third track on this record. I’m afraid if my friends hear me listening to it, they’ll pinch my cheek and call me “Sport.” It’s what I’d do if I caught any of them listening to it. I’ve only just made it to Track 4 right now because I’m too busy typing to change the album. It’s a song called “I Box Up All the Butterflies.” I’m going to box up this album and throw it off a bridge.

The Pitchfork review tried to convince me that there was some kind of underlying darkness or tension to The Law of the Playground, but all that little argument did is remind me of the Patton Oswalt bit about trying to convince people in Sterling, Virginia, that Phil Collins is really dark and out there. No…fucking…dice.

This is not to say that I’m immune or somehow enraged by cute things. It’s nearly universally agreed that my fiance is cute as hell, and I love her. Okay, fine, if you wanna pin me strictly to music, let me ask you this: did you read just the other day when I was all gooey about the new Metric album? Of course you didn’t, but that album is pretty fucking cute. Dressy Bessy makes cute music and doesn’t piss me off. I’d even say that there are one or two Sigur Ros tunes I would describe as cute and I definitely don’t want to assault them.

The trouble is this: the guys in The Boy Least Like To Impress Me (Jof Owen and some other guy I don’t care about) give me the sense that this child-like cuteness is their thing. It reminds me of the scene in Adaptation where Donald announces, “My genre’s the thriller, what’s yours?” The Boy Least Likely To Ever Get Laid has staked out sounding like innocent children as their little niche and indie kids who pay too much for old-looking sweaters and think that this review is just plain mean might just eat up this OshKosh-sporting bullshit, but I don’t. If you want a lesson in the childlike wonder department, listen to, I dunno, almost any Flaming Lips song. Wayne Coyne’s wonder isn’t preciously innocent, it’s hard-won and the better for it. The Boy Least Like To Keep His Milk Money strikes me as a band who is marketing their music to my inner child. Well, guess what? My inner child just downed two pints of Guinness and is riding down a hill on bicycle with no helmet while shouting Tom Waits’s “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” at the top of his little lungs. My inner child doesn’t need The Boy Least Likely To Read Bollocks! and neither do I.

And there are two songs on this album with the band’s name in them. That’s another too-cute for words gimmick that I won’t tolerate. Unless your band is called Fuck You and every song on your album is called “Fuck You”, I’m not interested in your coy incorporation of your band name into song names. Fuck you.

Even the album cover pisses me off at this point. It’s a terrified, cute little animal in a toy tank. Isn’t that precious? I realize I’m raggin pretty hard on the cuteness thing, but here’s the point: no band – no band – has any business worrying about being cute or innocent or tough or sexy or any fucking thing. If you’re in a band, your focus should be on making good music. Everything about The Boy Least Likely To Make A Good Album from the album cover to the song titles to the Blues Clues cuteness of Jof Owen’s vocal “stylings” is designed to make me tell my fiance (or some other hapless bystander) that The Boy Least Likely To Say “Shit” Even if He Had A Mouthful is just so gosh darn refreshingly cute. Well, I’m the boy least likely to ever tell anyone to listen to The Boy Least Likely To. And I’m apparently out of jokes about their name.

No Life On the Horizon

Let’s open the case file of “Great Moments in the Pot Calling the Kettle Black”, shall we? A couple of weeks ago, while doing  a radio interview to promote No Line On the Horizon, Bono (he’s in some band or other… can’t think of which one) apparently called Chris Martin (for the heterosexual males in our audience, Chris Martin is the guy from Coldplay) a wanker on the air. The DJ tried to wrestle an apology out of Bono, but didn’t really get one. Which is ostensibly good because, come on… Chris Martin is a wanker. But so is Bono. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Bono and Chris Martin are engaged in some kind of Highlander-esque battle of wankerdom that will culminate in one of them beheading the other on a mountain top and becoming the Ultimate Wanker.

My cyncial side (which is about 75% of all of my sides) says that Bono was trying to drum up a little controversy to boost album sales. There was a massive media blitz to promote No Line On the Horizon before it came out, including a five night residency on Letterman and the afore-mentioned live BBC Radio interview. When you’re hustling that hard to promote a U2 album, there’s a reason. And the reason is that No Line On the Horizon is a complete meandering mess of a record.

This was touted as U2′s Big Change Album, the one where they set out to radically change their sound. Apparently, that meant hiring Brian Eno and jamming some songs into 5-Plus minute territory. No Line On the Horizon is the kind of change you make at U2′s age – a safe, calculated “change” that’s mostly in the wrong direction. There’s still The Edge’s annoyingly chimey guitar tone (although it’s buried in some of the songs), Bono’s histrionic vocal spams, and his lyrical cliches (“Only love can leave a mark like that,” he sings on “Magnificent”), which are getting lazier by the day (see all of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” if you can stand it). The only really surprising thing about No Line On the Horizon is its uniform awfulness. But even that’s not much of a stretch in my mind, because I’m one of the only people on earth who didn’t like How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (I thought “Vertigo” was a pretty embarrassing song, but then I heard “I’ll Go Crazy  if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” and “Get On Your Boots”).  In fact, when I think about it, Achtung Baby is the last U2 album that I still listen to from start to finish and I only do that on occasion.

There’s some new musicality to be found on No Line, a few more keyboards and electronic noises, but it’s not compelling enough to help you forget the tossed-off lyrics – it’s almost as if Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were brought in to try and hide the fact that Bono is becoming a worse writer by the day. Not only does “Get On Your Boots,” weld the vocal melody from Elvis Costello’s far superior “Pump It Up” to the melody from that 80′s song “Wild Wild West” (who the fuck did that song? I can’t remember for the life of me. Was it Culture Club? Who cares?), it features the not-at-all-revelatory statement, “You don’t know how beautiful you are”, a line I was putting in songs back in the 9th grade. For the record, those songs have been destroyed.

“Be careful of small men/ with big ideas,” Bono warns on “Stand Up Comedy,” a song that makes me sorely miss “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, and that seems like a credible warning for someone who is going to brave a listen to No Line On the Horizon. For all its attempts to shake things up, it only reveals that U2 is incapable of the radical departure that they think this album is. If they really wanted to shake things up, they’d make an acoustic blues record, or a stripped down punk album, recorded live in one take (in other words, they’d plug The Edge straight into a Marshall amp with no goodies, forbid him from playing clean, and see what he’s really made of. I suspect the answer is that he’s less than the sum of his annoying effects pedals), or… well, it doesn’t matter because they can’t do it. Take Bono’s Coldplay-baiting radio comment. It’s exactly the sort of faux-controversial comment you make when you’re incapable of being really challenging. I’ve no doubt that Bono really believes Chris Martin is a wanker and that’s kind of my point – everybody believes that Chris Martin is a wanker. Bono – and his bandmates – are buried too deep in their own innocuousness to come up with something really radically different. For instance, Bono could’ve gone on the radio and said, “Gordon Brown is a monkey-fucker” or “I’m sick of Morrissey’s bullshit and I hereby challenge him to a pistol duel at dawn,” or really anything more interesting than pointing out something that is already ingrained in the public consciousness as firmly as the absolute knowledge that Chris Martin is a wanker.

In their day, U2 was a really great pop band and there’s nothing at all wrong with being a great pop band (The Beatles, anyone?). I can understand the band’s desire to change their sound a bit, but they don’t have to sacrifice good songs to do it (again, The Beatles, anyone?). The biggest change that U2 has made between How to Dismantle a Decent Band and No Life On the Horizon is that they’ve gone from ignorably bad to actively terrible. No Line contains three of the worst tracks I’ve ever heard from U2 – “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” “Get On Your Boots,” and “Breathe,” which apes Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on the verse and doesn’t get much better on the chorus.  Granted, I’m not the biggest U2 fan in the world (can you tell?) but there is one test that U2 should be able to pass with flying colors: my beautiful girlfriend, who can fully acknowledge and forgive both Chris Martin and Bono for their inherent wankerdom, likes both Coldplay and U2. Her take on No Line On the Horizon? “It sounds like Old People music.” I can assure you that she has no greater perjorative in her vocabulary for music (she’s much nicer than I am) and I’ve cringed with despair when she’s leveled that charge at some of my favorite acts. I used to think that only 2 things were objectively true about music: 1) everyone’s girlfriend loves Coldplay and 2) everyone’s girlfriend loves U2. Number 2 is on shaky ground at the moment.

Shortest Bollocks! Review Ever

Recently, we here at Bollocks!were accused of creating (and foisting upon an unsuspecting public) “overwrought prose.”And by “we”, I mean “me”.

So in an effort to be less overwrought (more underwrought, or just wrought, I guess), I thought I’d sum up 4:13 Dream, the new Cure album, as succinctly as possible:

This album is a fucking mess.