“What do you call yourself, if anything?” wonders the opening couplet of Cass McCombs’ new album, Tip of the Sphere. The words were probably not intended as navel gazing. But they lend themselves well to the enigma wrapped in a wayfarer that is McCombs.
He has long been a hard singer-songwriter to get hold of, literally and metaphorically. Since coming gradually into renown over a period of 20 years, the native Californian has sofa-surfed and periodically worked in construction; he once painted the walls of a flat in Trump Tower. Around the release of his 2011 album, Wit’s End, McCombs compounded his elusive reputation by requiring journalists to interview him by snailmail. He hung out with fellow musicians in LA, Brooklyn, Maryland, London, wherever. “I’m totally supported by my friends,” he told an interviewer in 2013, around the time of his Big Wheel and Others album. “That’s how I exist.” Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, dubbed McCombs’ true-believer notoriety among other musicians “the cult of Cass”.
For a maverick never much given to explaining his moves, his actual music is not especially forbidding. Rooted loosely in indie rock – Elliott Smith is a reference point – McCombs takes in canonic influences (Bob Dylan, Neil Young), is informed by blues, the hippie era, the Grateful Dead, psychedelics. But his lyrical output can tend to the gnomic and cosmic, even as it often has its roots in storytelling and the everyman experience. His penchant for the oblique is part of the reason this fortysomething troubadour has mooched about, just shy of the gate to the American songwriters’ pantheon, for so long.
Of course, McCombs rewards deep listening. Tip of the Spheres is his ninth studio album of ever-expansive Americana, one where his myth properly matures. It follows the excellent showing of his 2016 expanded palette of an album, Mangy Love, in numerous end-of-year lists.
As before, McCombs has filled 11 tracks with a wide range of inputs, from country to ragtime to jazz; the excellent production and looming sense of space here is a marker of how far his musicality has come. One song, Real Life, turns on a dime from one mood into another; you lose count of the instruments puttering around unobtrusively in the background, never yelling “saxophone” at you.
Tip of the Sphere plays with place and placelessness (California, the void), with legends and shadows, “authentic fakes” and “cuckooland”, all the while being a record you can comfortably spin in the background, until it demands your attention thanks to some unexpectedly engrossing music, or a puzzle. The final track, Rounder, is a lengthy, choogling boogie that makes you hate the Grateful Dead just a little less. Another song, American Canyon Sutra, is intoned beat poetry about a rubbish dump. It should misfire but doesn’t, weaving personal recollection into “the bottomless canyon of nightmares” via groovy soul.
McCombs’ lack of interest in easy interpretations endures and, if anything, prettifies, on this engrossing record. Spheres, of course, have no tips – they are perfectly round. The album’s title is likely to be a pun on the military phrase “the tip of the spear” – one that refers to the first combatants into battle who pierce the enemy line so that the main body can follow – but given a celestial McCombs tilt. A few threads are graspable through McCombs’ will-o’ the wisp-like work. He looked askance at state-sanctioned violence towards Chelsea Manning on the song Bradley Manning (from 2012’s B-sides and outtakes, A Folk Set Apart) which recounts the ballad of the WikiLeaks whistleblower’s experiences at the hands of the military. It wasn’t McCombs’ only “political” moment, just one of his most overt.
McCombs plays with language too, searching less for the humour in puns than the hidden avenues in pat phrases. Here, Sleeping Volcanoes is an easy-going tune that invites you in, before wrong-footing you. “Help me, Armageddon,” runs the chorus, a plea at odds with the band playing out blithely. The entire album has an eye on the end of days; McCombs has said that the song is about “people passing each other on the sidewalk unaware of the emotional volatility they are brushing past, like a sleeping volcano that could erupt at any moment”.
“We’re all over the world,” goes one recurring lyric. The initial gist of “all over the world” is “widespread” – but that changes. By the end, “we’re all over the world” means “we are all sick of the status quo”. (“We’re over it!” McCombs quips, cheerily.) There follows a riff on the words “world” and “war”, reinforcing the song’s doomy prognosis, and the idea of the slipperiness of language. “Until the next world/ The third world or the next world war/ Class war all over this world/ We’re all over the world.” The mellow tune carries on.
Elsewhere, McCombs’ songwriting becomes more personal, then less, defying easy categorisation. Tying Up Loose Ends (“before I gotta go”) discusses family photos with burnished instrumentation taking centre stage; finality lurks in the wings. A southern rock workout, The Great Pixley Train Robbery is, by contrast, written from the perspective of a fugitive who robbed a California train in 1889, who surrenders and asks for redemption.
The thing is, McCombs’ sphere does have a tip, of sorts. The album’s beautiful artwork is based on a piece made by a California artist, Tahiti Pehrson, called Castillo de la Esfera (Castle of the Sphere); a flat rendering of a three-dimensional sphere that has been set into motion in some of the videos for these songs. As it moves, the sphere acquires a vanishing point – a tip.
Buyers of the vinyl album, meanwhile, get a three-dimensional version to assemble and spin on their turntable. The whole thing is a tribute to Beat artist Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a device that sought to achieve trippiness via stroboscopics, mimicking the brain’s alpha waves; an online video, voiced by Robyn Hitchcock – McCombs is a massive Anglophile – instructs the user how to wig out safely to the album and the spinning castle. Gysin is just one staging point on a long road McCombs has been on for some time: exploring the margins of understanding.
This former skateboarder, long keen on mind-expanding substances, is no longer playing the role of wastel busker with a guitar and a piercing stare, but rather settling into a new one – that of road-wizened seeker, deep-seated musicality to the fore.
