Doug McCombs likes to play bass — a lot. At a quaint Mexican eatery in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, the low-end guru known for his work with Eleventh Dream Day, Tortoise and his own side project, Brokeback, expounds on his obsession with the deep tones of his favorite instrument. “I’m really into basses,” he says between bites of his steak taco. “I like playing them, talking about them — it gets super-geeky.”
The instrument suits him well. McCombs, a gentle giant of a man, speaks in a consistently slow, deliberate style that mirrors the cadence of his reliable and inventive bass lines. Although he may be most famous for his role in Tortoise, it is with Brokeback that McCombs’ bass-work shines brightest.
When McCombs first considered pursuing a solo project in the late ’90s, he was not motivated by vanity as much as plain boredom. “When I started I was looking for something to fill up some time,” he says. “The way Tortoise ended up going was that we’d work on stuff intensely and tour, which took up about a half a year. And then we wouldn’t have anything to do for the other half of the year. So I just got antsy.”
Brokeback released its third album, Looks at the Bird, last month on Thrill Jockey. On the album, McCombs plays a Fender six-string bass because of its flexibility. “It allows me to express more like one would use a guitar,” he says.
The album is a mostly instrumental affair that contains many of the same genre-morphing hallmarks of McCombs’ other band, Tortoise. Elements of jazz, rock, ambient and electronica are mixed throughout the album. But the difference is the laid-back, improvisational nature of Brokeback compared to Tortoise’s highly layered and structured compositions. Full of warm tones and sparse, airy instrumentation, the album’s mellow nature also separates it from McCombs’ previous work with other bands.
“It has to do with trying to make the Brokeback stuff different from Eleventh Dream Day and Tortoise,” he says. “I try to let Brokeback have its own evolution because there are already so many influences coming from my work with those other groups.”
The nine tracks breeze by on the first listen, and the album’s subtle, intricate melodies only become apparent after several uninterrupted repeats. Although these melodies may initially seem like mere atmospherics, they are “the main focus of this group,” according to McCombs. “I realize that it’s the kind of thing that you have to sit down and listen to or it’ll never click. Sometimes I worry about that, I think, ‘Are these records interesting enough?’ I think they are because, although you can’t listen to it in a crowded bar, you can get something out of it if you really sit down and listen to it. That may be a downfall of the way I write songs but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
With the new album comes a new official member to the group: Noel Kupersmith, bassist (of course) for the avant-jazz group the Chicago Underground Trio. “I never ruled out collaborating with anyone else and now Noel is my partner in every aspect of the group,” says McCombs. “He writes some songs and we do all the arrangements together. In the beginning I thought it was cool to do it by myself but after a little while there wasn’t enough variety involved. Although I thought the individual songs were good, in a live setting I thought that it was too much of the same thing and I felt that it would be too monotonous.”
Kupersmith brings his considerable bass talents — he plays double bass on every track — as well as his engaging programming techniques. His glitchy tweakings are most prominent on the track “The Wind-Up Bird.” “That one is basically his,” said McCombs of the subtly driving tune. “He wrote it and did all the programming on it. There’s always the danger of things sounding the same so new developments are welcome.”
The first two Brokeback albums featured many part-time collaborators, and Looks at the Bird continues that tradition. “We wanted to have specific people on the album because we like the way they play,” says McCombs. “And then later on we would figure out what they would do on what songs.”
Along for the ride are Kupersmith’s Chicago Underground Trio cohorts Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor, holding down cornet and drum duties respectively, Tortoise mastermind John McEntire who produces and plays drums, Japanese artist Aki Tsuyuko on organ and Stereolab vocalists Laetitia Sadier and the late Mary Hansen, who sings on three of the albums most affecting songs.
Hansen, who died in a traffic accident last December in London, contributes eerily poignant lyrics. “I still don’t know how I feel about it,” says McCombs. “It’s weird that someone you’re friends with won’t be there anymore. I wanted to have Mary on the album partly because she’s been on every Brokeback record and I wanted to make sure that she would continue to be on our records because I consider her to be an auxiliary member of the band. It makes me feel great to have her on this album.”
The only song on the album with words, as opposed to ethereal cooing, is the Hansen-sung “Pearl’s Dream.” The Walter Schumann song was originally featured in the film The Night of the Hunter, and McCombs attests to the great influence film scores and soundtracks have on him.
“I go to see a lot of movies and I’m into film,” he says. “The first time I ever remember paying attention to music in movies was in Sergio Leone westerns, the music by Ennio Morricone. The guitar player in his band was also a starting point for me. But I think music should be able to stand on its own separate from a film.”
With its naturally warm, inviting bass sounds and intricate subtleties, Looks at the Bird easily stands on its own as a quirky-yet-satisfying album. nyou
