A distant, mournful tune under the dyad moon

The latest episode of my podcast The Allender Calendar is a two-parter in which I talk to musician and all-round good egg William Doyle about Wit’s End by Cass McCombs. Listen here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

When William guested on Your Own Personal Beatles, the podcast I co-host with Jack Pelling, we bonded over our mutual admiration for this fabulously baroque album, which we both firmly believe to be McCombs’s masterpiece.

Wit’s End is ornate, funereal, blackly funny, incredibly moving, and almost entirely inscrutable. McCombs hasn’t really made another record like it, and I can’t think of another album to compare it with, although Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s stately I See a Darkness, with its gloom, grandeur and laughter in the dark, isn’t a million miles away.

A particular highlight on Wit’s End is ‘The Lonely Doll’ (presumably inspired by the Dare Wright children’s book of the same name). It’s a remarkably engrossing song considering it’s only made up of two chords, the second of which, as William points out on the podcast, differs from the first by only one note. (For the guitarists out there, the song seesaws between C major and C major add 11. Play a C chord and then place your little finger on the third fret of the D string. Repeat for five and a half minutes.) It’s such a significant song to William that his tune ‘Soft to the Touch’ is a form of homage to it.

In our conversation I mention how ‘The Lonely Doll’ reminds me of the folk tale ‘Tam Lin’. I think that’s a bit wide of the mark – but there is certainly an air of enchantment about it, notably in a couplet which, I was delighted to discover, William is as fond of as I am:

Though I was too drunk to make sense
I felt her Essence

I don’t really know what’s happening in these words (or in the song in general). Why ‘Essence’ (which is inexplicably capitalised in the lyric sheet)? What does it mean to feel someone’s ‘Essence’?

In the song, the narrator is stumbling home from a saloon1 when he hears a ‘distant, mournful tune’. He follows the music and finds a ‘cardboard house’. Peeping through the window he sees the titular doll singing into a mirror. After watching her comb her hair (with tears in her eyes) and retire to bed, we get the sense/Essence couplet. (What is it about her Essence that he feels? Her loneliness?)

So far, so winsome. But where is the song taking place? What is real and what is fantasy? Is it all just a drunken dream? If it’s symbolic, what does it all stand for? The song seems to exist in a vague space between fairy tale poesy, irony, and something… sincere?2 Because, for me, that couplet taken in isolation, away from its self-consciously saccharine setting, seems to say so much about loss – loss of self, loss of sense, loss of love. One reading of it is, ‘Despite being too drunk to make sense, I felt her Essence’, but another way of looking at this particular blackbird could be that it’s the state of drunkenness itself that’s allowing the narrator to feel the Doll’s Essence. The idea that, somehow, in losing something, you might get closer to something else. In that sense (!), I don’t think there’s a better description anywhere of the sentimentality and spirituality of inebriation.

It’s this quality of ambiguity and uncertainty – layered meanings and obscure intentions – that makes Wit’s End, and Cass’s songs in general, so beguiling. It’s never really clear where we’re standing. In this song, and its parent album, we’re poised between grief and mirth. And, if you’re too drunk to make sense of the words, you can just enjoy their musicality; the gorgeously intoxicated nightfeel3 of their chiming sibilance.

Sticking with all things baroque, I came across this beautiful lost classic by the Idle Race on a playlist compiled by the writer Ray Newman (you can find it on Tidal and Spotify). There are so many amazing tunes on here: John Barry’s sumptuous ‘Follow Follow’, the Hollies paddling in lemonade lakes, and a band called Grapefruit sounding remarkably like the Clientele. All the songs seem to be rooted in a very specific post-Pepper, pre-Abbey Road period of fey introspection. A sliver of 60s time that contains multitudes (as most slivers of 60s time seem too – a particularly scholarly Beatles fan should be able to tell you what was happening on each day of January 1969, right down to what colour shirt John Lennon was wearing).

If psychedelia was part Wordsworthian childhood wonder and part Coleridgean drug-addled dreamscape (a kind of ‘see Emily play the game existence to the end’) then this playlist is at the more whimsical end of the spectrum. Psychedelia at the gates of the boarding school rather than the cosmic gates of dawn. I mean, there’s a song by Gary Aston which is a lament about being posh for God’s sake.

On Bluesky, Newman described the perfect setting for the playlist: ‘It is a warm day in London in the middle of the 20th century and you have nothing to do but sit in the park.’ Early 21st century in London and it’s too hot to sit in the park – next best thing is to stand in a Tesco Express, press play, and let the harpsichords and mellotrons guide you towards a Solero.

Ralph Hill is a thirteen-year-old preacher from Detroit whose sermons were recently packaged as Live at Lavender Country, a collaboration with musician and artist Jonny Campolo. Hill’s sermons are accompanied not by traditional Hammond organ, but by Campolo’s ambient synth playing, all new age pads, spacious chords and glassy tones smothered in reverb. It’s an inspired and genuinely spiritual mixture. But I feel it’s important to resist the temptation to exoticise or ‘other’ this music – even though its strangeness is indeed a part of what makes it so hypnotic. But would it sound strange to someone deeply embedded in Black church traditions? Is the combination of a preacher’s voice and an 80s synth unusual or unexpected to all audiences? And is it right that this music was designed for a sincere spiritual purpose, and I’m consuming it, not ironically exactly, but as a kind of esoteria? Difficult things to wrestle with and yet I have to admit that my unfamiliarity with the form, and the record’s unexpected juxtapositions, are what make it some of the most compelling music I’ve heard all year.

Preachers’ voices have been released as music before: ‘Help Me Somebody’ from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sets a sermon by Reverend Paul Morton to a frenetic and thrilling Afrobeat backdrop. It’s a groundbreaking album, but it also contains what the music journalist Kate Hutchinson brilliantly calls a ‘complex subplot of appropriation’. The difference with Live at Lavender Country is the fact that the arrangements are authored – Hill’s voice isn’t being taken out of context; it was recorded with Campolo’s accompaniment. However, the fact that I found out about the album via Pitchfork, and that it’s been released on a trendy cassette label, means that it has been taken out of a kind of cultural context. A hipster audience (of which I am unfortunately a member) has been drawn to it for its very strangeness – the thing I'm trying (and failing) to resist celebrating. Because there are moments in ‘Snatched’ that do feel strange – intoxicatingly strange: the way Hill whoops and gasps for air, and bursts into fragments of theatrical melody. He reminds me of the ways in which Van Morrison at his most unrestrained can sound absolutely hysterical (in both senses of the word); if you’ve never heard his extraordinary version of ‘My Lagan Love’, give it a spin now. This is not to criticise Ralph Hill or Van Morrison in any way. If you completely expose your spirit, or, more precisely, let the spirit speak through you, you might end up sounding outlandish, outrageous, comic even – but, as I’ve talked about before in relation to Kate Bush’s ‘Big Sky’, it’s in that fearlessness that this music gains its power. ‘Snatched’ is the sound of someone in an instinctive flow state, totally unfettered by expectations and judgment.

Lily Goldberg, in her excellent Pitchfork review, describes how Hill ‘delivers his sermons as fervent filibusters’, and I’m fascinated by the way Hill doesn’t let up or lose focus for a moment. In his richly melodic voice he invents instant proverbs and contorts grammar with spontaneous wisdom: ‘God is a napkin in the middle of a weeping time’; ‘I was once wasn’t the brightest colour in the crayon box’.

Hill uses the word ‘snatched’ in his sermon to refer to the idea of being ‘snatched’ by God’s grace. The word is repeated until it spirals into non-meaning (recalling Van again: ‘the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves’). Or maybe that’s not quite right. The word ‘snatched’ does feel like it loses its semantic meaning as it transforms into pure sound and rhythm – but something else is happening too. Paradoxically, the word seems to gain new layers of meaning through repetition. By becoming incantatory, like a prayer or a mantra, the word’s meaning changes into something you don’t understand intellectually but physically. It’s less about the dictionary definition of the word and more about the experience of being snatched by grace. You might ask yourself, did you really know what the word snatched meant… feel what it really meant before you heard Hill preach about it?

I am continually amazed by how heavy music keeps getting heavier. It’s heaviness all the way down. It’s hard to even hear guitars in the maelstrom of ‘Block of Flats’; it sounds less like a riff and more like being pummeled in the face by a slab of obsidian. If someone tried to notate the tab for it the only instruction would be: become entombed in a quarry.

Keeping it heavy, I’m really enjoying the music of unpeople. They don’t dress like a metal band. In their videos they appear to be having a high old time. They have incredible pop hooks. They remind me of the first time I saw Metronomy in that they look like a gang. I’m hoping to chat to the singer Jake on The Allender Calendar sometime soon!

Speaking of the podcast, I have one more episode of the current series ‘dropping’ in the middle of August, and it’s a chat with the music journalist Simon Reynolds about his brilliant new book Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994. After that, I’m going to take a break (although I’ll be back with a Christmas special) before returning next year with a new series. Thanks for listening so far to two full Allender years!

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