Drinking with Cass McCombs

What did Cass McCombs just say? You've been drinking with the man for the better part of an hour (he came with the friend of a friend) and the conversation's been strictly on the lighter side – you just moved back to Detroit, he just moved to Chicago; you just quit your job, he just signed to Domino Records. That kind of thing. And though, with all the noise, it's hard to hear anything clearly in this bar, you're pretty sure he just said, "Stick a needle in my eye. I'm middle class 'till the day I die."

"I'm sorry," you say, "it sounded like you said–" He starts to get up.

"Be right back," he mumbles. "I'm going to put something on the jukebox." He says it so casually. Actually, Cass McCombs says everything casually. You've only just met, but already this guy has to be one of the most laid-back people you've ever come across. He moves and speaks without urgency, confidently but lazily. Yet, there's an intellectual aggressiveness behind his sleepy manner, like an intensity he's keeping in check. And now you're pretty sure he just spoke to you in couplet.

Cass is walking back from the jukebox and over the speakers you hear what could be the new Midlake – warm-bottomed, tissue-soft indie rock. The vocals are tissue-soft, too, but with added aloe. Swells of rich harmonies come and go. The singer's got a good tenor, without drama.

"This is nice," you say as he slides back into his seat. "What is it?"

"My new album," he replies, cleaning his teeth with a car key. "Dropping the Writ."

"But I thought–" He cuts you off shaking his head.

"I know. It hasn't come out yet. But old playthings are all laid to waste. Thrown out to make a better space," he says by way of explanation, then notices you blinking your eyes and adds, "Well, you know what I mean."

"Cass, I don't think I–" you start, but before you can continue your waitress has arrived and is taking a new round of orders. Cass's eyes are half closed as he scans the menu absentmindedly. His record is still playing in the background and has gotten softer. Cass is singing The world is so vain and uncertain/A death in the family and I'm in love again over dark fairytale folk. "I'll have the porter," he decides and then, as if remembering something, takes you by the writst. "Do you ever get the feeling," he asks, eyes wider, "that you're being followed by a van? Yesterdays yet to come?"

"Dude," you say, "how much have you had to drink?"

He thinks about it for a second. "Not much. But, you know, as one memory eludes me another consumes me." You look around the table. Nobody – not your friends, not the waitress – seems to have noticed the strange things coming out of Cass McComb's mouth tonight and you start to wonder if it's you who needs to slow down, maybe order a soda. Cass is staring at you.

"Nothing is impossible," he says, smiling. "A double negative is a positive, is it not?"

Near squirming, you try to change the subject. Try to get the conversation back onto a superficial course. "Hey Cass," you say, "you were telling me about your new apartment in Chicago."

"Yeah," he says, fond distance in his eyes. "I miss my old place in California though. In my small room without a window I was grateful enough just to be alone." You nod, pretending to understand, pretending things have gone back to normal. Cass is listening to his record now. It's rocking again, a low-rolling echo of full-band thunder over which Cass sings lyrics that are nothing less than his life story, beginning with his freaking birth. "This one's called Lionkiller," he says. "I think I'm going to start the album with it."

"That sounds like a good idea. I was just going to–" But Cass is on his feet.

"Excuse me," he says. "But I should go. I don't know what's come over me – the full moon or infinity." Then before you can react he slips a bar napkin into your hand and he's gone. You look around, embarrassed, sure everybody's watching. But nobody's watching. You open the napkin and see some messy chicken scratch. You make out the words Buzz across the universe to the mind's hive. Beyond a shadow of a doubt you're lucky to be alive. It's beautiful and you are, in fact, buzzed so you just lean back and stop fighting it. Cass is still whispering lullabies over the loud speakers and you close your eyes, listening as a harmonica drifts in and out and Cass sings something about ex-lovers and pregnant pauses.

Cass McCombs - Petrified Forest [From Dropping the Writ - Domino Records]

Cass McCombs - Petrified Forest [From Dropping the Writ - Domino Records]

Joan As Policewoman "The Ride"

This song is more Sade than Sade. I refuse to say more.

Joan As Policewoman - "The Ride" [From Real Life]

Fujiya & Miyagi @ The Pike Room Oct. 4

Reviewed Fujiya & Miyagi's show at the Pike Room last night for Detour-Mag.com.

It’s called motorik. When the beat is driving and buyuoant; when the soft-focus synths cruise out from the horizon straight at you like an Autobahn breeze through your windswept hair; when the pulse is so steady it fills you with equal parts wander and lust, it’s called motorik. And last night, Fujiya & Miyagi brought plenty of motorik to one of the intimate music rooms inside a new suburban Detroit club called the Crofoot.

Read the rest of the review.

Exodus to Pontiac (for Detroiters)

Salvation may have arrived for live Detroit music, only we'll have to go to Pontiac to get it. Without naming names, let's just say I've been burned out on downtown Detroit venues for a while. Mostly because of the simple fact that they sound bad. (They smell like vomit too, but a little scent of bile never hurt anybody.) Sure, if you go higher-tier, like St. Andrews and The State Theater you're more likely to get a better mixed show, but step below that and you're in for some real midrange abuse. Like cat screeches and baby wails recorded by a $5 Radioshack special and magnified at weapons-grade levels straight into your eardrum kind of abuse.

I don't have anything against the D. I grew up 313 and, while I can't exactly say "the city's been good to me," I can say that it has its charms and I want the best for it. But the little bit of out-of-state touring I've done in bands only showed me that it doesn't have to be this way – that the United States indie rock trail is littered with plenty of establishments that take pride in what they're doing enough to offer bands the chance to communicate their musical ideas legibly in a relatively filth-free setting. There are places like the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland, OR and Rubbergloves in Denton, TX that not only sound phenomenal but have style and self-respect to match. To my crew, who cut their teeth playing Detroit's hardest dive bars, these places seemed like something out of a commercial for toilet paper and coming home to reality was a drag. Detroit has needed a competing venue on that circuit for years.

I've never felt that independent music belonged sandwiched in bars. Not exclusively. I guess if the music is designed to be listened to while drunk then, by all means, stick with the blown speakers, passive aggressive soundmen and park-at-your-own-risk location – and we'll all work ourselves up into a state of intoxicated agitation. But so much of the rest of music is a statement of some kind – art of some kind, actually – and at least deserves a decent frame to be considered in. Yeah, serve booze, but let it be secondary. We need music venues that happen to serve alcohol, as much as we need alcohol venues that happen to serve music.

I think I found one. I covered the Fujiya & Miyagi show for Detour last night and hiked it out to Pontiac, to a new venue called the Crofoot. (I say "hiked it," but it took me about the same amount of time it would take me to get to, say, The Majestic.) The Crofoot is a three-in-one musical complex in the vein of New York's Bowery Ballroom or The Knitting Factory, with rooms ranging in size from intimate (Pike Room) to cavernous (Eagle Theater). The place was crisp. It smelled like new (not a tinge of vomit, but give them time); all freshly cut wood paneling and shit. But more importantly, the sound was SOUND. I could have used a little more bottom end, but in general all the details were in the right place. I could tell who was playing what. I could hear vocals. I didn't even need a catch rag to dab a bleeding ear.

Fujiya & Miyagi were great, too. I've been discovering the really good Krautrock like Neu! and Cluster this year so I was definitely prepared to appreciate it. I had never heard them before and because the sound was clear, I got to experience them the way they intended to be experienced. When I got the album later, it sounded just like the set I had just seen. [Bonus: I had no problem finding a parking spot on the same street (there are lots for cheap all over the place anyway) and I wasn't confronted by aggressive strangers asking for my money with their faces inches from mine.]

This isn't an anti-Detroit rant, anti-street person, or anti-anything. It's pro music. I like live music and it's good to know there's a decent place to see it again.

Tangerine Dream - Phaedra

Short review of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra up at Detour-Mag.com. Make sure to listen to the mp3. It's essential.

When Edgar Froese first created Tangerine Dream in 1967, the seeds of deconstruction that would dissolve the band’s initial acid rock strains had already been sewn. Well, in Froese’s mind, at least. He had always imagined the group as a canvas for the Dadaist notions he’d developed while studying under Salvador Dali and hanging out in Berlin’s avant-garde scene. It just took the Dream a few releases to get there – to “un-band” in a sense, and drop the rock instruments entirely. Their new toys? The first generation of synthesizer technology, hefty analog synths and mellotrons that weighed as much as a refrigerator but were also the source of hot, largely unheard of cosmic sounds. It was space age voodoo at the press of a key.

Read the rest of the review.