Kevin Bronson on December 1st, 2011

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By Amelia Earhart

Why do musicians – particularly singer-songwriters – get termed “elusive” just because they don’t relish commenting on their already deeply wrought self-expression? Isn’t the act of putting the thoughts that keep you awake at night to song and then singing them in front of a large room full of people revealing enough? What more do you want, indie-rock fans? A kidney?

Cass McCombs is one of those Elusive Artists. At least, so say his press clippings. He’s recently taken to conducting all interviews via snail mail. And at some point his label had to hire a paparazzi to get current photos of him.

But he seemed pretty upfront when Wednesday night he began his set at the packed (and I mean seriously packed – people were sitting on the floor to hold their spot) Echo with a simple, “Hey, how are you? It sounded as if he genuinely wanted to know.

Silhouetted against a shimmering gold pixellated background, both binary and ethereal, McCombs and company began their long set with “I heard my master / spoke with your master / What was it for? / Was it in commerce?”

An answer of sorts, “Dreams Come True Girl,” swept its spell around the room teen-dream style before McCombs stepped back and let the synth – in lieu of Karen Black’s wind-blown vocals – take the whole thing to another level with a kind of John Zorn-meets-Booker T closing solo. Why not?

“Robin Egg Blue” followed, by then the audience in his palm. I crept closer for a better view, sacrificing sound quality as one must at the Echo. It was worth it. In the half light, I could easily see McCombs during the heartbreaking “County Line,” on which he played the keys. There was not a speck of tension on his face. Head tilted back, that easy croon was all his own. He got to revel in it just as the crowd did – and it struck me that that was the product of all that hard-won elusiveness: the chance to offer one’s art open palm without an arbitrary context applied to it by some journalist during an interview grabbed when he was driving from Springfield to Springfield.

And McCombs – the author of not one, but two, albums this year, April’s “Wit’s End” and November’s “Humor Risk” – continued to savor his moments for the rest of the set, the slimmest of effects on his guitar, not one on his voice. People started to sway in spite of themselves. I felt my shoulders drop by three inches. The music wrapped itself around us like fog and I lost track of the setlist. Some idiot yelled “Play some heavy shit,” which seemed to trouble McCombs not one bit.

Not a bad evening’s work. I didn’t feel deprived. When McCombs gathered the three-ring binder at his feet and left without an encore, no one else seemed to, either.

Photo by Marco Annunziata