For an artist who ordinarily focuses on what’s next, Cass McCombs has been doing quite a lot of rummaging through the vaults lately. This collection of early, unreleased material comes out at the same time as the backwards looking 2000-2004 Demos, Live and Radio, which is to say the very beginning of the McCombs emergence as an artist.
Category: Cass McCombs
Cass McCombs :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
His tenth full-length, Heartmind at times feels like a representation of Cass McCombs’ own wandering mindset. While the album’s eight songs vary in tone and style, they all seem to hold a common thread, whether lyrically or musically. It’s an album that McCombs couldn’t have intended to make precisely, as to direct himself toward it, would’ve been to betray his own ambitions.
Cass McCombs :: Heartmind
In the liner notes of Cass McCombs’ tenth full-length album Heartmind is a rambling paragraph that hides within it a depiction of the creation process: “If I direct myself, I betray my direction, so I keep walking..” McCombs seems to be telling a story about caroming about the streets of San Francisco, but it’s also something akin to a lost Oblique Strategy. Within the album’s classic run-time of 8 songs and 43 minutes is a genuine attempt at avoiding betraying direction and attempting to understand more of the world around us.
Cass McCombs :: Mangy Love
“Oh, please tell me you academics, how do you wake up from a non-dream?” That impossible question is one of many loosed by Cass McCombs on his latest album, Mangy Love […]
The Skiffle Players :: Til Stone Day Comes
On the heels of last year’s A Folk Set Apart , a decade in the making compilation of Cass McCombs b-sides, rarities and other detritus, comes something altogether new: The Skiffle Players. Cass McCombs, […]
Cass McCombs :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
“Most of my albums are a simple collection of songs that have nothing to do with each other except that they were written around the same time and, perhaps, have […]
Cass McCombs :: I Went To The Hospital
Before Wit’s End, before Catacombs and before the near universal ‘year-end list’ acclaim, Cass McCombs quietly released A in 2004 via the Monitor label. I’ve been reintroducing the album piecemeal […]
Cass McCombs :: The Same Thing
Humor Risk , Cass McCombs second full-length of 2011, is set to release on November 8 via Domino Records . Here’s the first taste, “The Same Thing.” At this rate McCombs may land two […]