I have always believed that David McComb is an artist worth obsessing over. The very idea of him seems so remote and yet so powerful that there is no escaping a certain David McComb cult. I joined it fifteen years ago, back when I first heard Born Sandy Devotional (a top ten album, still) and then rejoined it for Calenture and his criminally underappreciated solo album. Christ, I was even obsessed with "Memories" once, the Leonard Cohen cover from The Blackeyed Susans' excellent All Souls Alive which I could not stop playing back in my troubled late teens. I might say my obsession was due to Warren Ellis's infectious violin or Leonard Cohen's sex-possessed lyrics - but, really, how could it ever be anything other than that voice?..
Which makes it inevitable, really, that each time I play this record (and I have been doing it quite a lot over the last month), I imagine that it is David himself who is singing these songs. I imagine a lost Triffids tape or else an unreleased second album - whatever it is, I hear a classic David McComb LP fucked up by providence. By doing that, I am not willing to denigrate any of the musicians behind the album - I am sure that David's friends would not mind. If anything, that has to be exactly what they were trying to achieve here. The voice, however, is only one part of the story, and it would not have been the same without the songwriting. Which, if you discount the misguided last album by The Triffids, was absolutely out of this world. In fact, I would be ready to wipe out any great name you would be willing to mention with nine minutes of "Field of Glass". Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out that a few friends (mostly people from the Blackeyed Susans, plus David's brother Rob) decided to record a collection of unreleased songs written by the great man.
An album like this is made for the listeners (mostly obsessed people like myself) as much as for those musicians who are involved in it. There is a great warmth to the whole thing, and you are just happy to be part of it. Because of course the songs are great, and they all have that unmistakable intensity which can be playful one moment and tortured the next. The opener "Kneel So Low", for instance, is every bit as good as David's "Setting You Free" single from 1993. The utterly charming Angie Hart-sung "Second Nature" is everything you need to know about McComb the pop songwriter. Other personal favourites include the laidback "Look Out For Yourself" and the spirited "Thanks For Everything".
Again, imagining David McComb singing these songs is absolutely fucking euphoric. Sad, too, but very often in life you have to take those things together. In the end, all that counts is that these are eight (eleven, if you buy the CD version) lost songs from one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. A miracle, really, and the fact that this is Volume One only adds to the wonderful sensation of discovering something that could have been gone forever.
