Cass McCombs: Catacombs

Label: Domino

One of Gertrude Stein‘s keenest quotes: “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.” This year is when things pivoted for Cass McCombs; despite four affecting and unwaveringly excellent records this decade, McCombs seems to have glided at low altitude across the indie singer-songwriter airspace. But something is different with the release of Catacombs. Enough people (especially fellow musicians) have been talking about him for enough time that it just feels like he’s arrived at the tipping point to which Ms. Stein refers. Of course, none of this would matter to him; Catacombs finds this poetic Lionkiller older and wiser, examining and imagining in his lighter-than-air, heavier-than-life voice over perfectly uncluttered pop-guitar arrangements, tinted with pedal steel. Nothing here is quite so sublime as his last album’s “Deseret,” but “Dreams-Come-True Girl,” with a stunning guest turn by cult actor-singer Karen Black, comes close. (She’s in the video too!) As an artist, the spectral McCombs seems to exist outside of time; in the world of fame and records bought and sold, his time is…now! (M.L. Thrope)