[photo by Will Oliver at We All Want Someone To Shout For]
Cass McCombs new album Big Wheel and Others is a real departure from his recent work. In 2011, he released both Wit’s End and Humor Risk and both albums owed much to the influence of the more sleepy Laurel Canyon music school. The shows in support of those albums were compellingly mellow and in particular the Bowery show in 2011 was one of the best shows we saw all that year. But Big Wheel is anything but sleepy — its pretty much a straight rock album and an ambitious double album at that. The tour in support of the album has been a lengthy cross-country trip that arrived at Bowery Ballroom on Thursday night. Cass’s band is a quartet of individual renowned in their own right, with the drums manned by Joe Russo, whose name has popped up often on this site in 2013. Dan Iead from the late great powerpop band The Broken West played both lead guitar and pedal steal, with versatile Portlander Jon Shaw (Battle Hymns and Gardens, Ez Weiss Quartet) (correction, thanks to comment: “Wolf!, Shpongle, Nicole Atkins, The Broken West, The Complete Last Waltz, etc”) on bass. The strength of the band was obvious from the start, as the album opener led off the set with a burst of energy. We’re streaming that track below. The balance of the set was a nice mix of material young and old — there were just six of the nineteen Big Wheel songs along with a democratic selection from each of Cass’s prior records. The Cass McCombs US tour is over, but he’ll be in Europe for six weeks in January and February.
I recorded this set with the Sennheiser Cards mounted at our usual spot in the center balcony. The room mix was quite superb with kudos to Cass’s tour FOH Chris Preston. We mixed in a very conservative amount of board feed to supplement the room mics and the sound quality is quite excellent. Enjoy!
Stream “Big Wheel”:
Download the Complete Show [MP3] / [FLAC]
Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request.
Cass McCombs
2013-12-12
Bowery Ballroom
New York, NY
Digital Master Recording
Soundboard + Audience Matrix
Soundboard + Sennheiser MKH-8040s > Edirol R-44 (Oade Concert Mod) > 2 x 24bit 48kHz wav files > Soundforge (level adjustments, mixdown, set fades) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3 and tagging via Foobar)
Recorded and Produced
by nyctaper
Setlist:
[Total Time 1:35:01]
01 Big Wheel
02 There Can Be Only One
03 Love Thine Enemy
04 Crick in My Neck
05 Morning Star
06 Angel Blood
07 Aeon of Aquarius Blues
08 Dreams Come True Girl
09 Lionkiller
10 The Burning of the Temple 2012
11 You Saved My Life
12 What Isn’t Nature
13 The Same Thing
14 County Line
15 That’s That
16 [band intro/encore break]
17 Sacred Heart
If you download this recording from NYCTaper, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Cass McCombs, visit his website, and purchase Big Wheel And Others from the Domino Records website [HERE].
wrong Jon Shaw (Wolf!, Shpongle, Nicole Atkins, The Broken West, The Complete Last Waltz, etc)
Thanks for the correction, its been fixed.
Thanks so much for posting this, I listen to the other Cass McCombs show I found on here a ridiculous amount.