Cass McCombs

Cass McCombs – Tip of the Sphere (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 6, 2022 · Comments off

For more than fifteen years now, Cass McCombs has been slipping around like wet soap. The Californian songwriter goes at his own pace and each new album blurs his sound a little more. So much so that the forty-year-old is perceived as a kind of outlaw in the indie scene, a man without a family… With his unusual pop, Morrissey folk, Velvet Underground-style country music, improvisations à la Grateful Dead and psyche-folk, McCombs explores a whole array of territories to create his fascinating music. Like its predecessors, this ninth album, Tip of the Sphere, is an assortment of poetic rock that cannot be fully digested in just one listening. With a pedal steel here and a drunken piano there, it’s not easy to decipher the man’s meandering mind. It’s a charm you can never get tired of. – Max Dembo

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Cass McCombs – Mangy Love (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 6, 2022 · Comments off

Mangy Love marks the eighth long-player for Cass McCombs, who, fans will be happy to hear, continues to hold form as a refreshing renegade on his game. The singer/songwriter takes on the messiness of life including timely sociopolitical topics, with grooving accompaniment that makes it go down breezily. Along the way, he dips into psychedelia, reggae, Baroque pop, funk, and more. Compared to the mercurial 22-track set that was 2013’s Big Wheel and Others, Mangy Love sounds focused and determined, even given a certain amount of style sampling. The album kicks off with “Bum Bum Bum,” a ’70s soft rock stroller that comments on the military-industrial complex and its enablers, including the drumming pun “bum bum bum.” Later, “Run Sister Run” addresses systematic misogyny with tropical rhythms and hand percussion (“Hiding behind a Supreme Court urinal”). The LP’s lead single, “Opposite House,” features fellow indie darling Angel Olsen on backing vocals. Slow-grooving bass and rhythm guitar, strings, and vibraphone set a chill tone for absurdist lyrics like “From the window I can see/You coming back to me/How can this be?/My window’s a tree.” Olsen is one of many guests on the album, including Blake Mills (“Low Flyin’ Bird”), Stuart Bogie (“Laughter Is the Best Medicine”), and HOOPS, the latter of whom appears on the psychedelic “It” (“It is not wealth to have more than others/It is not peace when others are in pain”). The roster of contributors is employed tastefully, as the album stays consistently coherent and low-key. Though those who don’t process the lyrics will be missing a lauded part of the McCombs experience, Mangy Love, arguably more than ever, works as a musical expression alone, mixing the sometimes caustic lyrics and roguish indie touches with an overriding smooth ’70s veneer. For those who take it all in, the album engages both the intellectual and aural pleasure centers. Or, to quote Mangy Love, it’s “Sugar and spice and everything weird.” ~ Marcy Donelson

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Cass McCombs – Heartmind (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 22, 2022 · Comments off

On Heartmind, Cass McCombs enters the double-digit-album phase of his career, a quantitatively rarified place for any songwriter; rarer still, though, is the fact that he does not yet seem to have settled into a qualitative sound or pattern, of singing the same thought twice (or perhaps even once). Songs like “Karaoke” are a god-level burst of power-pop perfection, as fetching as anything Cass has ever cut. The springy staccato guitar, the vaporized electric keys, the melody seemingly born for singing or clapping or dancing along: Cass triangulates a perch of his very own out among The Go-Betweens, The dB’s, and The Cure, and vibrates there, a beacon. And then, of course, there is the song’s playful if painful lyrical conceit-the lover who is making all the sacred motions of commitment but whose feelings may be no more deep or real than someone simply reading the lyrics for “Vision of Love” or “Stand by Your Man” from some crowded bar’s TV screen.

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