★★★★
Like a trickster god of American song, Cass McCombs seems to appear every couple of years with a skewed take on a different vein of popular music.
On Mangy Love, McCombs brings his gifts to the worlds of soul and West Coast psychedelia, scratching your dad’s Steely Dan itch while showcasing some of his best songwriting to date. Though some may find its scrappy eccentricity off-putting, Mangy Love is an oddball gem from one of the most interesting singer-songwriters around.
The album pivots all about the place, moving from the psychedelic stomp of ‘Rancid Girl’, a throwaway garage track that wears its crudeness on its denim sleeve, to ‘Laughter Is The Best Medicine’ and the Prince-inflected pop/funk of ‘Cry’. It’s a record that refuses to stay still, an album that takes aim at a dozen different targets, throwing hooks left and right.
That said, the reggae and David Byrne style talk-singing of ‘Run Sister Run’ is lacking, and later tracks ‘It’ and ‘Switch’ are undercooked, but there’s a childish joy in even his less successful experiments that prevents these weaker moments from bringing things down.
Mangy Love is a challenging and brilliant album from a singular artist.
Cass McCombs’Mangy Loveis out now through Anti.
