Video: Cass McCombs - What Isn't Nature

Where is Cass McCombs from? His 4AD page says "Cass McCombs was born in the Bronx, Haiti, and Tahiti in 1977." Wikipedia says , "McCombs was born in Concord, California." and that "He has spent most of his life traveling the United States, moving from one city to the next, settling at one point in Baltimore." On his own MySpace page he simply claims "here and there". He was living in NYC on 9/11/01 - an experience he has cited as an influence on his music. Today (Nov 12, [...]

Just read that Ariel Pink is on tour with Cass McCombs right now... It seems like a great pairing. Both genre stylists have that vague punk edge despite their more melodic tendencies. Cass McCombs has been a favorite for a while now. He's had a couple of great albums out there from years back. Lyrically dense, harmonically sound, simple tunes. "What isn't nature" is prime example of what I like so much about Cass McCombs... The song's simplistic, repetitive structure evokes an appealing, somewhat nihilistic, philosophical stance. I can't figure out many of the [...]

this track is really cool. ariel pink has been around for a while now. i saw him a while back when he opened for grizzly bear at spaceland. i thought his live show sucked, and he was a prick. i bought one of his self-made, one-of-a-kind t-shirts because i thought it was cool and had to talk him down from an asking price of $75 to $15. it wasn't that hard... also, the shirt is pretty weak. i must have been drunk. and it was dark. and this hot girl behind the [...]

every time i close my door, i sit at my desk, facing the door. every time i close my door, after thirty seconds it eases open, because it won't stay shut. my door won't stay shut because it is slightly too large for its frame. i almost asked the workers to shave it down, slightly, but i forgot. i forget every time because it really doesn't bother me much. except when i sit down at my desk and it eases open, unexpectedly, every time.

related to, but distinguishable from the aforementioned song-sound dialectic, this is the result of being repeatedly slapped in the face by mass media and other meaningless catch-phrases, in addition to the abstract consequence of spam, pop-ups, and non-mahalo-generated web searches. the wind-tunnel effect is akin to standing in a large cylindrical room surrounded by ten large speakers which play a different form of sound for a matter of seconds before they alternate and one stops when another begins, for example it all begins with this group of twenty kids laughing really loud and having fun but then it switches [...]

the beginning of an exploration of pop music theory, pitting the best elements of song composition against the most unique forms of sound production, fusing the two with a force greater than the collision of opposite polarities, with the boomerang effect of a black-hole whipping you around and then making you forget everything that happened like those memory-erasers in men in black, and then your mind is blown like that ground mixture inside a sausage wrapper that tastes sooo good if you boil it and serve it with worcestershire sauce and maybe some grilled peppers and onions over egg noodles, [...]

Right now, I'm pretty sure I'm the first person in the world to hear the new Radiohead album "In Rainbows." The only thing that is more certain than this is the influence that this record will have on the music world. I can say that even though I haven't heard the whole thing yet. I could have said that a week ago, too. After all, it's a Radiohead record, and it's already shaken up the music industry pretty substantially. The marketing/distribution scheme behind this record has been the subject of every major news stream since the [...]