Hmm, this is interesting. It's one of those darkly intriguing debuts that shadows a number of alt.rock moves and recalls certain past glories without ever getting too reverential for its' own good.
For the uninitiated (which will be most of you at present), CASS McCOMBS is a young, Baltimore,MD-based singer/ songwriter with a handle on the fatalistic mid-fi of our favourite Mid-Western self-loathing lotharios like Bill Callahan, Will Oldham (who McCombs has previously supported) and their distant West Coast doom trilogy cousin Mark Kozelek.
"Not The Way" itself opens this generous six-track salvo and is certainly reminiscent of early Red House Painters. With a tight-but-loose semi-acoustic group of acolytes (including Neil Hagerty's drummer Dutch.E.Germ) backing him up, McCombs sings in a whiny, pasty and uncertain voice that's actually pretty attractive with repeated exposure. The song has a typically chastising chorus of "That's not the way to make friends," though it's my guess the similarly disposessed will dig this guy in droves.
He cements the friendship over the course of a further five seasick, wobbly and wholly compelling tracks. Of these, the fragrantly narcoleptic drone of "Opium Flower" with its' lonely "Venus In Furs" drums and shades of Mojave 3 and the death-knell pop expanse of "Your Mother & Father" (sample lyric: "What will you do now to get along, now that your Mother and Father have gone?") are arguably the best, though the creepily humourous self-loathing of "Nobody's Nixon" recalls Smog (not least that Callahan-esque line: "I'm nobody's puppy, I'm not your doggy-woggy neither") and the wonky afterhours 12-bar blues of the closing "It's Getting Colder" sounds like Mazzy Star getting smashed with The Faces and is an extremely odd way to sign off.
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"Not The Way", then, is a busted, bruised and blasted debut from a young guy who's already writing convincingly of life's travails and sounds very much like he's experienced most of them at point-blank range.
"I spend my life fighting off regrets," he shrugs on "Nobody's Nixon", but really the only regretful ones are ourselves if we miss out here. This guy's good. Mark my words.
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