Quirky Californian singer/ songwriter CASS McCOMBS' debut album "A" was an enigmatic little marvel from left-field. Its' apparently lackadaisical attitude to recording in a tight and orderly way failed to obscure the fact McCombs writes compellingly emotional songs of the highest quality. Indeed, tracks like "A Comedian Is Someone Who Tells Jokes" and the wonderfully moving "I Went To The Hospital" were good enough to be mentioned in the same breath as the fatalistic likes of Bill Callahan. Not bad, by anyone's standards.
But, with follow-up "PREfection", McCombs has surely bettered it. It's the product of McCombs working with his fellow musicians - Natalie Conn (keyboards), Trevor Shimizu (bass) and the splendidly-named drummer Dutch.E.Germ - very much as a band and the end results are notably tighter than on "A". As we'll see, the lyrical input still swerves between fatalistic and plain old esoteric, but - at least in terms of musical construction - "PREfection" is much more of a linear pop album and McCombs proves he can work just as adroitly within such confines.
Not that it's exactly devoid of weirdness either. Opener "Equinox", for example, settles into a pleasant, but slightly unsettling nocturnal lope, with Cass delivering curious, Burroughsian cut-up lyrics (e.g: "The wedding is followed by gifts/ Catherine de Medici lives/ Silverfish quoting testicle/Despotic owl conducts the wolves" - er, come again?). It's fascinating nonetheless, and the music's echoe-y premise serves it beautifully.
Tracks like "Multiple Suns" and "Cuckoo" up the intrigue ante too. The former employs a gnarled Glam stomp of a riff, is circled by vulture-like keyboards and featutes typically fatalistic lyrical intrigue such as "I'm looking forward to losing all my hair/ I'm looking forward to looking backward", while "Cuckoo" is a melting, yearning piano-led ballad,with the band's restrained playing a major boon on top of it. "Bury Mary," meanwhile, is arguably even better: a tremendous slice of OTT Southern Gothic, it's quite possibly the most gleeful murder ballad ever (sample lyric: "Ping ping goes the shovel! Ping-pang goes the pail! The middle of summer and the furnace will be burning") and sounds like Howe Gelb fronting the Doug Sahm Quartet. Cool.
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But there are moments when "PREfection" sounds unashamedly poppy too. "Subtraction"s tambourine'n'organ-heavy indie Motown rush is kooked, wired and immediate; "Tourist Woman" is beat-up indie pop with an infectious urgency, buzzy guitars and fruity organ straight outta The Strawberry Alarm Clock's back catalogue and recent single "Sacred Heart" is a gorgeously sad, chiming, Smiths-y affair. Its' mordant chorus ("Dearly departed, all will return to the soil - alas!") is SO Morrissey it's enough to make you choke back the tears. For all that, it's quite possibly the best song McCombs has committed to tape thus far.
But really - with the exception of the silly twiddly ambient noise that takes us to a close following final track "All Your Dreams May Come True" - "PREfection" refuses to put a foot wrong. For "PREfection" read 'perfection' or at least something bordering on it.
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