Distant, moody notes reverberate, leading the warm, lost, echoed voice of Cass McCombs on the six-song EP that debuted his music to the world, Not The Way. The EP, released in 2002, is a brilliant introduction to a soulful sound that churns together classic '60s and '70s sounds with a modern alt-country-folk-on-deadly-amounts-of-heroin feel.
The songs vary a bit but are probably best heard while driving at night or in a room with candles and imminent nudity. The EP opens with “Not The Way,” a wonderful tune about how not to make friends that is one of the strongest songs in the collection. It has a uniquely live feel with a loose guitar strum, a lazy country drumbeat with a soft cymbal ride, and relaxed, harmonic vocals. “So Damn Pure” follows it up in style with a more pronounced Dylan feel and a quicker tempo. This is followed by “Opium Flower,” which sounds like an unguised tutorial of what heroin makes you feel like as it crawls along at a snail’s pace with a constant hum of the organ and sleepy strum of the guitar (imagine the slow section of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” but on better modern drugs).
The song is great for addicts, recovered addicts who want a taste without rehab, and health teachers doing their drug unit, but as a song it’s a bathroom break for most of the audience. The EP speeds up with “Your Mother And Father,” which helps blood flow back to the brain with another lonely, faroff ballad. The EP closes with “Nobody's Nixon” and “It's Getting Colder,” which has a great acoustic Exile on Main Street / Let It Bleed vibe, mixing together great chord progressions with old school sounds like the honky-tonk piano.
The fact that it lands right above Cat Power on my iTunes artist list might be fate pointing out the obvious because Cass is much like a male version of Cat Power with a little more tempo at times. Overall the EP is a great introduction to Cass’s characteristic sound and absolutely a good listen if you are in the mood or in the car.
|