cut worms // nobody lives here anymore
Cut Worms (nè Max Clarke) has released one of the most jubilant, jangly, and infectious albums since the work of The Byrds in the mid-late 1960s. Nobody Lives Here Anymore is Clarke’s second full length album, written after touring with acts like Jenny Lewis and Kevin Morby. While recorded in Memphis, it’s not particularly country or exactly folk-- it’s 2020 low-fi meets Buddy Holly with hints of the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison. It’s a stunning achievement; a deeply satisfying 80-minute barnburner that secures Cut Worms place in the realm of exciting new artists.
Clarke takes his moniker from the William Blake proverb “the cut worm forgives the plough,” from the book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Issue, he said “I just like that. The destruction of one thing becoming two new things.” In the PR release for Nobody Lives Here Anymore, Clarke described the album as a comment on “throwaway consumer culture and how the postwar commercial wet dreams never came true, how nothing is made to last.” If it is a reflection on that kind of impermanence and delusion, it’s interesting how that relates to the idea of cut worms: that out of the destruction of one form of society, another can be created. This relationship between destruction and creation is explored throughout the album.
On “Sold My Soul,” he sings:
I sold my soul somewhere so long ago
Oh I didn’t think too much at the time
I was young and I didn’t know
Oh till I saw it late one night
On the Antique Roadshow
Expert collectors to appraise
And on the ear worm “All The Roads,”
All the sudden I'm off
Somewhere
And everyone just seems to
Sit and stare
At something that I can't see
And it haunts and terrifies me
For everything on the Earth
It has eyes
And so it comes as no surprise
The only thing that's yours
The way It was before
Is now nothing more than what you choose to
Face
Perhaps he’s alluding to our minds and memories being the only things that are ours, but it’s also our memories and past that we have to reconcile. On “Castle in the Clouds”:
But nobody lives there anymore
In the castle in the clouds
Nobody lives there anymore
In the castle in the clouds
They’ll leave you pounding on the door
...
To pry open the heart that’s rusted shut
Mend the lines of talk
Where they’ve all been cut
Just as you’re
Turning to go
From the cliffs that
Tower below
Send you off and let you fall so slow
And all your memories leave you
Alone in the hands of thieves
And con men that carry you off in the smiling breeze
Lyrically, the album feels like waking from a dream. There are bits of memory, there’s trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, there’s the Jungian illusionary properties that make up the dream itself. Musically, the complexity comes from the relationship between sounding like 1960s folk-rock and being firmly planted in the 21st Century. On paper, it should sound dated, or like a meditation on nostalgia. But it feels modern despite its obvious influences, largely due to the arrangements of the songs taking something of an Anti-Phil Spector approach. There is no Wall of Sound. Producer Matt Ross-Spang, an integral part of the Nashville music scene, has used a careful hand in his construction. The production is minimal, allowing the inherent beauty of the songs and Clarke’s voice to shine through.
The album is a treasure trove, like a magician’s infinite scarf, bop after bop after bop appearing and defying what seemed possible. Nobody Lives Here Anymore is 17 tracks by an artist who seemed to appear out of nowhere and dropped an album so solid, so mature, so self-confident, that it takes its place among the artists it emulates. This album will sit quite nicely in your vinyl collection, between The Byrds’ 5th Dimension and Bob Dylan’s Bring it All Back Home. In other words, it is an instant classic.