The traditional provocateur Diogenes – a type of Grecian hybrid of Slavoj Žižek and Steve Bray – is certainly one of Cass McCombs’ latest obsessions. Born two and a half millennia in the past, Diogenes demonstrated his radical philosophy by dwelling on the streets of Athens, sleeping in a ceramic wine vessel and offending the general public with varied stunts, all within the service of sticking it to the corrupt ruling class of the time.
McCombs’ fascination is comprehensible, for Diogenes may simply have stepped from his catalogue; say, from one of many Californian’s many songs celebrating outsiders, the broken and addicted, “the poor and screwed”, as he put it on 2013’s “House On The Vary”.
As peripatetic as he’s usually been, McCombs has not to date made his residence in a jar. But his opaque, twisting lyrics have persistently handled existential and absurd questions: issues of spirituality, morality, property, private duty. That that is by no means boring, or in in the slightest degree earnest, is all the way down to McCombs’ use of unreliable narrators, sarcasm, the language of the gutter and different acts of literary subterfuge. “Silverfish quilting testicle”, goes 2005’s “Equinox”; a music on the significance of voting is titled “Don’t Vote”, its contents equally deceptive; the beautiful “Morning Star”, from 2013’s Massive Wheel And Others, muses on the sensation of defecating in house. With McCombs, smoke and mirrors are de rigueur, no person is talked all the way down to and no-one’s given the straightforward solutions.
If all his information include fathoms to discover, Heartmind, his tenth, is likely one of the deepest. It’s a departure from the course taken on 2016’s Mangy Love and 2019’s Tip Of The Sphere: these had been shiny explorations of the American psychedelic rock custom, presentable sufficient to satisfy the in-laws as soon as the scent of weed dissipated, and so they earned McCombs extra listeners and plaudits. Heartmind is a thornier and in the end extra fascinating proposition, returning to the lo-fi experimentation of his earlier information throughout a breezy 42 minutes.
There are eight tracks right here, and virtually as many genres, with half the album firmly rooted in American traditions: “Unproud Warrior” a wistful folks waltz with a jazzy rhythm part, a mirage of a Nashville Pentangle; “A Blue, Blue Band” a major-key nation ballad with beautiful harmonies. Each these songs additionally function fiddler Charlie Burnham, who supplies earthy responses to McCombs’ traces along with his artfully distressed voice.
Opener “Music Is Blue” is crunchy rock with complicated Crimson rhythms, “Karaoke” evokes The Treatment’s mid-’80s pop pomp and “Belong To Heaven” is electrical folks with a tinge of the Caribbean. That’s not the one international affect on Heartmind: a jet-setting cousin of Mangy Love’s Afrobeat-influenced “Run Sister Run”, “Krakatau” is full-on cumbia with multi-tracked percussion, the sound degraded like a cassette that Habibi Funk may need present in a cellar. The closing title observe is maybe McCombs’ personal model of non secular jazz, with corvid saxophone, Moog synth, electrical guitar and uillean pipes – a surprisingly psychedelic instrument – extending the piece to eight and a half minutes.
“New Earth” is positively tropical, a kitsch slice of exotica with bossa nova chords and synthetic fowl noises, McCombs’ mushy vocals backed by a feminine refrain. Pay attention with half an ear and also you’ll discover traces about “such a glad day” and “at this time is the beginning of a brand new earth”, however dig slightly deeper, and a few type of apocalypse appears to have occurred, maybe the destruction of the earth itself. This “glad day”, you realise, has come “after a really, very, very dangerous day”, McCombs keening “thank God time has ended”. Elsewhere within the music, “tweeting was muted all season… Mr Musk was in a foul manner/Stewing in his bullion like a phony chef…”
“Unproud Warrior” performs the identical trick as “New Earth” and “Don’t Vote”. A story of a younger, discharged soldier, it initially romanticises the plight of the veteran: “September the second, 2017/That’s your discharge date, etched in your soul/It’s been practically two years now, passed by so quick”. The character is struggling with the issues he did, and with the truth of struggle in comparison with the films. However as the image comes into focus, McCombs means that he alone is chargeable for his decisions – “a soldier is just not a cog, however a person, like some other”. He even argues that youth isn’t any excuse, stating the ages at which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, SE Hinton The Outsiders and Stephen Crane The Pink Badge Of Braveness, “which continues to be generally known as probably the most sensible depictions of struggle/Although Crane was born after the Civil Battle ended”. It’s courageous, but it surely works.
McCombs principally makes use of his Twitter account to pay tribute to departed artists and mates, and Heartmind is devoted to a few of his misplaced compadres, Neal Casal, Ladies’ Chet ‘JR’ White and Sam Jayne. “Belong To Heaven” is a becoming memorial, honest and touching however nonetheless nuanced – “for all of the questions I need to ask/I hope that you simply discover peace eventually… so far-off from all that now/I assume it doesn’t matter anyhow”.
Like Thom Yorke, McCombs has a voice that sounds endlessly honest, and like Yorke, it means the humour in his lyrics can usually be misplaced. There’s, although, quite a lot of comedy on Heartmind. “Karaoke” opens in a bar, a personality taking the stage, “a Chiffon, a Supreme/And studying from a TV display”. Breezily sprinkling its traces with titles of karaoke classics, it raises questions on authenticity and the roles we play. “Guess I’m a load of karaoke too”, he concludes. It’s an actual ear-worm, the one observe right here that would displace “County Strains” as McCombs’ ‘hit’.
“A Blue, Blue Band” additionally supplies mild reduction. The story of a bunch from Virginia Metropolis, Nevada, in a blue van, who flip audiences blue too, it meanders via a number of comedian verses – “there’s an incredible harmonica participant whose title now escapes me” – earlier than ending with a reminder of the facility of music, an echo of the opening “Music Is Blue”: “Hearken to them enjoying what’s been weighing heavy in your coronary heart”.
Maybe that’s McCombs’ conclusion on Heartmind: that music, from karaoke to bar-room ballads, can have an effect on us in methods nothing else can, can change hearts and minds much more than sleeping in a jar could do. The message is unclear, messy even, as issues are in actual life, extra usually than in music.
Finally, pinning this endlessly complicated songwriter’s work all the way down to a single tagline or which means is unwise. His songs aren’t at all times simple, they’re not at all times simple, however 10 albums in, they’re mounting as much as create probably the most spectacular our bodies of labor of the century to date. Absolutely, Diogenes would have dug him too.
