Uprooted
Slippery songwriter shakes the branches to release eleventh album.
By Victoria Segal.
Trunk rock: elusive singer-songwriter Cass McCombs slips between realities.
Cass McCombs
★★★★
Interior Live Oak
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
WHEN IT comes to Cass McCombs, there’s a risk of complacency. Not on his side – on Interior Live Oak, the Californian singer-songwriter is as watchful as ever – but from that of the listener, who after 11 albums of cosmically questing music might simply expect nothing less than a line as richly allusive as, “I was working as a soda jerk/Listening to old Panthers’ stories/Over lime rickeys and tuna fish”, or a song that spins around 19th-century Irish-Bavarian proto-burlesque superstar Lola Montez.