1 hour ago
3
As bloated piles of “content” overfill our cultural to-do lists, a double album isn’t always met with a warm welcome: an 80-minute film is seen as lean, but an LP of the same length is seen as an exasperating slog. But if anyone can change this mindset it’s the US singer-songwriter Cass McCombs, whose 74-minute new double LP begins at the highest songwriting level and barely wavers. McCombs’ career stretches back to the early 00s, and this unassuming 47-year-old has steadily walked the valley floor of US indie ever since, often overlooked compared to his hyped peers, but perhaps with a longer career for it. This is his 11th album, not counting compilations, collaborations and a terrific posthumous album by New Hollywood icon Karen Black, which he oversaw.
The centre of his palette has always been folk-rock but the edges have held other imaginatively mixed colours: the vocal to his 2007 song That’s That, a tale of youthful romance leading to a job as a toilet cleaner in a Baltimore nightclub, could have been crooned over pedal steel by a mid-century country star; his 2009 duet with Black, Dreams-Come-True-Girl, sounds like it’s been beamed from a homecoming dance in 1955. Amid his poetic, sometimes gnomic lyrics would come real-world details: in 2012 he told whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s story in song, while New Earth – from his previous and, until now, best album Heartmind – addressed Elon Musk, heralding a bright post-apocalyptic world where “orchids mock him, spread so wide / With a lurid flavour his foul name could not hide”.
That particularity and plurality is all over Interior Live Oak, full of dreamscapes anchored in real-world settings (New York’s George Washington Bridge, San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid), and backings that are both classically American but also have their own weird back-country accent.
The album opens with Priestess, an ode to a late friend that harks back to McCombs’s California youth, again with specific detail amid strange painterly settings: “In our seminary of contradictions / Ella Fitzgerald, thizz and whippits / you were our priestess.” It’s core McCombs mode, grooving along in a slow lupine lope, rather like his best-known song Bum Bum Bum. It gives us the first tear-jerking moment, too, as McCombs yearns to hear his friend sing John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery one more time.
There are more tears to be shed on piano-driven ballad I Never Dream About Trains, in which our narrator affects not to care about a lost love, his protests underscoring the devastation: “I never dream about you curled up in that old army jacket / On the sand in Pescadero / I never lie in my songs / And I never dream about trains.” You can imagine Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra singing it, or another waltzing number, Strawberry Moon. The very best of the ballads is Missionary Bell, a song whose melody is so simple and expressive you can scarcely believe it hasn’t always existed. The bells of the title sound across a landscape of “wild fennel in the wetlands, nightfall hurling down”, as McCombs again considers death and the people it leaves behind.
The album’s long runtime means that these all feel wonderfully unhurried, and it gives McCombs space for other expansive, ruminative songs. Asphodel putters along at the pace of the Modern Lovers’ Roadrunner, considering yet another dead friend as McCombs travels through a mystical bardo; Who Removed the Cellar Door? has the twang and wide-angled lens of spaghetti westerns; Lola Montez Danced the Spider Dance is a slow ritualistic stomp with the nihilism and dry heat of a Lorca play.
Diamonds in the Mine is a grownup existential lullaby you might sing to a troubled partner; Peace has an acoustic guitar riff of extraordinary dexterity and prettiness; Juvenile, a funny song that throws two fingers up at soulless ad men, is powered by a Devo-style organ line you’ll be humming all week. If anything, as the title track’s nervy Dylanesque fuzz-rock brings everything to an end, 74 minutes doesn’t feel remotely long enough with McCombs on this sort of form.
This week Ben listened to
Llondon Actress – Moscow
“I’m a dragonfly, you’re a cockroach!” The 11th single this year from the young UK rapper-producer delivers on its boasts: a prowling cloud rap track with a repeated vocal melody pulsating through the fug. His new EP Billionaire Supervillain has also just been released.
