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”.
