Tony Stamp reviews Cass McCombs' satirical songs about sadness, Domi & JD Beck's hyperactive jazz, and the ambient banjo music of Andrew Tuttle.
Heartmind by Cass McCombs
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The way art can grapple with pain or heartache and produce something joyful comes up frequently when reviewing albums. Bands getting angry about politics, or singer-songwriters processing grief through sad songs, are wonderful and important, but people putting on a brave face while staring down tragedy? That’s the stuff that really gets me.
There’s been a lot of upbeat music these last few years, and plenty of musicians outright stating they want to cheer people up. But the latest from Cass McCombs wasn’t prompted by global events, rather it was personal loss that informed his songwriting. And the results are uplifting in a way that’s hard to fake: the kind of happiness provoked by realising the time we have left on earth is precious.
McCombs hails from California, and his output since 2003 has drawn plaudits for its mix of country, roots, folk, and his often satirical lyrics. In 2016 the New York Times called him “one of the great songwriters of his time.” He’s often compared to fellow hushed singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, but McCombs always felt slightly more refined and a bit less dangerous.
There’s a niceness to a lot of his music that perhaps obfuscates its sly wordplay. ‘Karaoke’, equates singing someone else’s song with questionable romance, as McCombs sings “is it all some kind of pantomime? Playing the role of romantic?”, while name-dropping a string of karaoke songs and artists.
‘New Earth’ is even more jolly on its surface, rendered ironic when you realise he’s singing about the end of the world and celebrating the finish of things like Twitter, phones and TV. He refers to human history up until now as a “very bad day”.
Heartmind is dedicated to three friends of McCombs who passed away in recent years. In interviews, he’s alluded to losing others too. Knowing that, it’s hard not to hear how it’s impacted his songwriting.
He told The Fader “things that are confusing or frustrating — horrible, dark feelings — music is a beautiful way to be honest about them, and also maybe imagine ideals.”
He sings about loss blatantly on ‘Belong to Heaven’ - the full lyric is “now you belong to heaven” - but even then it’s couched in a cheery singalong with layers of vibrant drum fills.
The saddest track musically is ‘Unproud Warrior’, which has elements of blues in its shuffling progression (it’s no coincidence track 1 on the album is called ‘Music is Blue’). This one isn’t focused on death, but rather loss of another kind, telling the story of a man returning home from the army and regretting his choice to enlist in the first place.
Cass McCombs’s songwriting is precise, but in the studio, he encourages the other musicians to do whatever they feel like, and not be beholden. A surprising amount of improvisation ends up on his albums, and there’s definitely the spark of something very considered meeting something spur of the moment on Heartmind.
The song ‘Krakatau’ employs percussion in its Latin-tinged groove, but my favourite aspect is the way that, after its four-bar progression, he adds in an extra bar with some particularly sunny chords.
It offsets the bittersweet with something decidedly more cheery - which is a good summation of the whole album.
Not Tight by DOMi & JD Beck
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A few years back I had fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole watching various musical studio sessions and stumbled across a duo performing bracingly hyperactive instrumental jazz.
I don’t generally subscribe to the idea that the faster the playing the better the musician, but the pair performed as if they were possessed, and the speed felt like a natural byproduct. They made everything else I’d been watching seem staid by comparison, and, while jazz isn’t exactly a fresh new genre, these two were startlingly young.
Domi Louna is from France and began playing piano at age three, going on to study at the Conservatoire de Paris and Berklee College of Music. JD Beck began playing the piano aged five and switched to drums at nine. They’ve been referred to as child prodigies numerous times.
Now aged 22 and 19, they’ve released their first album, Not Tight. It’s a title with a double meaning - 'tight' can sub in for the word ‘cool’ in parts of the States, but it could be an ironic reference to the playing on this album, which is absurdly tight (or in unison), at a level most humans will never achieve.
The pair got a boost in profile when they joined Thundercat for a live performance on Adult Swim which also featured Ariana Grande. He appears on a few tracks to shred his electric bass, alternating with Domi’s virtuosic keyboard runs.
A few other guests pop up, with the most unexpected being indie slacker Mac De Marco, lending typically unpredictable vocals to ‘Two Shrimps’.
Hip hop adjacent musician Anderson Paak signed Domi and Beck to his record label and released the album in conjunction with the iconic jazz outlet Blue Note.
Those two worlds give a good idea what to expect - this is unmistakably a turbo-charged type of jazz, but elements of hip hop do creep into the production and the songs where Paak guests, as well as Snoop Dogg and Busta Rhymes.
It’s those songs where you can feel the duo bending to accommodate their guests, and can sound a little forced. A better match is Herbie Hancock, who shows up at 82 years old to provide his vocoded voice and piano on ‘Moon’.
Domi and JD Beck have referenced advice they got to record the album ‘as live’, capturing a performance in the way classic jazz musicians would have, but they rebelled against that, saying “We don’t want a snapshot of what we do to be our art. We want something built.”
So their parts were recorded separately, allowing for more tinkering in post-production. Still, what you’re hearing is mostly the sound of two performers. They fill each song with such a huge number of notes it doesn’t leave room for much else.
Not Tight isn’t always an easy listen - despite their efforts at light and shade all those notes start to feel a bit exhausting, and I must admit I enjoy their music more when I can see them performing it - Domi exploring scales with her left hand at lightning speed, and JD Beck deploying so many hi-hat hits it can start to feel like drum n bass.
Maybe it’s my advancing age, but on record, I’m more drawn to the moments when they slow down a bit.
Fleeting Adventure by Andrew Tuttle
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At the start of the month, a Tweet by UK DJ and journalist Bill Brewster caught my eye, in which he touted an album of ambient banjo music. It’s a genre I’m not sure I’d encountered till then, but his message sent me toward an album that delivers exactly that: soothing tones and textures made in large part by instruments more commonly associated with folk and country.
It's the fifth album by Brisbane musician Andrew Tuttle, who describes his work as a space “where banjo and acoustic guitar meet processed electronics”. It’s an interesting combination, if sometimes counterintuitive.
‘Freeway Flex’ starts with cavernous sounds generated from six-strings delayed and reverbed into infinity, before the familiar sound of an unprocessed acoustic enters and provides some melody.
When pedal steel guitar appears, as it does on the song ‘Next Week, Pending’, it makes perfect sense, able to generate chords that stretch on endlessly. It’s Tuttle’s banjo that often acts as disruptor, wandering through these serene landscapes and adding its naturally percussive, busy sound to proceedings in a way that enlivens everything.
That track has oceans of pedal steel courtesy of Nashville musician Luke Schneider, with electronics from Darren Cross, who fronted Aussie indie band Gerling in the nineties.
‘Overnight’s A Weekend’ features Americans Steve Gunn (on guitar) and Michael A Muller providing electronics, violin from Frenchwoman Aurélie Ferrière, and even saxophone, played by the very appropriately-named Joel Saxby.
Tuttle’s playing tends to approximate verses and chorus, rather than sitting on one chord like ambient music can. He seems equally influenced by genres like bluegrass and country, which come to the fore on tracks like ‘New Breakfast Habit’.
Elsewhere, songs gather in strength through duration, drawing out their progression to achingly lovely effect: ‘Filtering’ includes guests on strings, saxophone and more, gradually coalescing into a sonic stew.
It’s in these moments that Fleeting Adventure is at its most transportive. Andrew Tuttle and his guests aim to soothe, but over time their patient repetitions build to music that’s euphoric and, somewhat counterintuitively, enlivening.
