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.
Steadily, however, Interior Live Oak becomes the kind of record it’s impossible to be casual about. After releasing 2024’s Seed Cake On New Year, a collection of unreleased music from around 2000, McCombs was inspired to return to his formative San Francisco stamping ground…