Cass McCombs

Cass McCombs is a master of dark humor. Over the course of five albums, he’s been so understatedly funny and subversive that you’d be forgiven for not noticing.

The title of his 2009 breakthrough, Catacombs, connotes self-destruction, but contained a number of uplifting, country-tinged arrangements—“You Saved My Life” was one of the decade’s best ballads. But even universal love songs like that were underscored by a subliminal sense of dread or overt lyrical morbidity. (A sweet story of a man who is underpaid but experiences fulfillment from his job is called “Executioner’s Song.”)

Both of McCombs’ 2011 albums, Wit’s End and his latest, Humor Risk, reference his complex attitude toward postmodern irony and the risk of being earnest. The latter begins, “Love thine enemy/but hate the lack of sincerity.”

Religious source material informs many of the lyrics, especially references to Christian scriptures in lines like “The word came first/ Let me speak the living word.” On album highlight “The Same Thing,” McCombs muses that pain and love are opposed, yet identical, and on “Love Thine Enemy,” he remarks, “Hypocrites especially follow the golden rule.” The album’s worst track, “Mystery,” contains the cringeworthy line, “Not everybody can be a saint/ Daniel was a good guy, but a saint he ain’t,” and the punchline, “And I’ll see you in hell!” This jaunty, alt-country number continues for almost eight minutes, and represents the biggest tonal contrast with the sad-sop introspections of Wit’s End, which occasionally recalled Elliott Smith at his most belligerent. The uptempo numbers on Humor Risk, for better or worse, comes off strikingly like an unromantic Ryan Adams.

There’s a constant tension between McCombs the self-serious artiste and his more humble, craftsman-like persona. It’s realized in bleak, pretty music videos of heroin addicts, songs like “AIDS in Africa” and even his generally negative attitude toward the media. But in some ways, this profile is more difficult than his actual work, whose highlights invoke a haunting beauty—classic territory mined by the best folk songwriters. McCombs gives the sense that his compass is oriented in that same direction.