Cass McCombs - Mangy Love '2016

Tracks list

On his eighth album, the singer-songwriter connects his gentle, acerbic soul to
his most politically charged, well-stated, and funniest songs.

On the very first song on his very first record, Cass McCombs went to the
hospital. There he received some troubling test results and found himself faced
with an unanswerable question. “Is it dying that terrifies you,” he
sang, in a gentle, boyish sigh that would earn him plenty of comparisons to
Elliott Smith, “Or just being dead?” It was a heavy introduction,
but, in its plainspoken intensity, it foretold the work to come. As
McCombs’ music progressed from murky lo-fi to austere folk-rock, his
on-record persona has evolved with it, becoming at once more fleshed-out and
more mysterious. He’s in a strange position now of being a veteran
songwriter who we’re just getting to know.

On his last record, 2013’s double-album Big Wheel and Others, McCombs
tried to show us everything. While it was his most ambitious
album—ranging from apocalyptic ballads to sunny, crooner pop, with enough
room to include a faithful Thin Lizzy cover—it was also his most
unwieldy, an album as road-trip that was exhilarating and exhausting. *Mangy
Love *takes the opposite approach, refining a career’s worth of ideas
into his most focussed work yet, accomplishing what *Big Wheel *set out to do in
about half the time. As expected from McCombs, *Mangy Love *is a uniformly
cloudy work, but it’s his most revealing album, his most political, and
his funniest yet. Across its twelve songs, McCombs dabbles in his deadpan
surrealism, throws in a few well-placed toilet jokes, and even shares some of
his Twitter drafts. “Netflix and die,” he scowls late in the album,
“Go on and cry.”

While McCombs’ career has been one of slow-building evolution
(“Season of the slug/Crawling up the vine,” goes a line on
“Medusa’s Outhouse”), Mangy Love’s first half feels
something like a crash course through his last fifteen years of songwriting. The
set opens with “Bum Bum Bum,” whose soulful, echoing guitars harken
back to McCombs’ early work. But the lyrics express confusion and
hopelessness in the current flashpoint of police brutality. “How long
until this river of blood congeals,” McCombs asks repeatedly, punctuating
each stanza with an exhausted “bum bum bum.” It’s one of the
most powerful songs McCombs has ever written: a plea for peace, or maybe just to
pay attention.

Other tracks follow suit, expanding on McCombs discography with a wider scope
and greater confidence. “Medusa’s Outhouse” floats like a
psychedelic smoke ring through Wit’s End’s wine-stained piano
ballads, and “Low Flyin’ Bird” hums with a folksy flutter,
recalling McCombs’ jammy detour on this year’s Skifflin’*.
*These songs highlight McCombs’ keen pop sensibility that informed
breakthrough moments like “You Saved My Life” and “County
Line,” without forsaking any of his idiosyncrasies. The juxtaposition of
the two are made immediately apparent amid the ’90s-Van Morrison jazz-pop
of “Laughter Is the Best Medicine.” Guest vocalist Rev. Goat Carson
slurs along with McCombs in almost-unison, his timing perfect, so as not to
spoil the punchlines. “Sugar and spice,” they sing together,
“And everything… weird.”

It’s a classic McCombs trick, flipping cliches into his own weird
vernacular. It’s also something of a mission statement for the
album’s back half. Songs like “Run Sister Run” and
“Switch” favor the groove over the hook, giving away their secrets
in the first 60 seconds and mostly just riding those vibes before fading around
the five-minute mark. While lacking the momentum and immediacy of the
album’s first half, these songs showcase the dynamics of McCombs’
band and the impeccably smooth production from Elliott Smith-collaborator Rob
Schnapf. Like Ariel Pink’s similarly expansive Pom Pom, *Mangy Love *is
comfortable in its experimentation, maintaining a consistent, lived-in
atmosphere throughout its separate halves.

Ever resistant to traditional structures, however, McCombs imbues each side of
the record with a track that deliberately disrupts the flow. “Rancid
Girl,” an outtake-quality oddball placed in the confrontational spot of
track two, loops a gnarly, bluesy riff while McCombs berates a 17-year-old
(“You’re bad/I mean, you *smell *bad.”) Think of it as a
symbolic sister to Neil Young’s “Stupid Girl,” the kind of
character experiment that one might have expected McCombs to have outgrown by
this point (which is probably exactly why he kept it on the album). On the
opposite end of the spectrum is “It,” a late-album stunner that
begins like the world’s saddest air conditioner booting up and climaxes
with a choir of harmonies behind McCombs’ vocals. The song bursts out the
speakers. “All of its life, wandering/All of mine, wondering,” he
sings, a simple turn of phrase that reads like a reflection on the work
he’s created: an ever-shifting body, with a restless brain behind it. But
even if McCombs remains impossible to pin down, on Mangy Love, he’s never
seemed more intent on making a connection.

01. Cass McCombs - Bum Bum Bum
02. Cass McCombs - Rancid Girl
03. Cass McCombs - Laughter Is The Best Medicine
04. Cass McCombs - Opposite House
05. Cass McCombs - Medusas Outhouse
06. Cass McCombs - Low Flyin Bird
07. Cass McCombs - Cry
08. Cass McCombs - Run Sister Run
09. Cass McCombs - In A Chinese Alley
10. Cass McCombs - It
11. Cass McCombs - Switch
12. Cass McCombs - Im A Shoe

Related artists