★★★★★
Indie troubadour Cass McCombs is an unlikely jamband soldier, but his wide-ranging eclecticism, his sneaky humor and his rootlessness jive with the artists that work in the ripples of the Dead's ever-widening wake. On his latest full-length, one can hear the results of McCombs recently rubbing musical elbows with Bob Weir (who covered one of his tunes) as well as Joe Russo and Mike Gordon (who both join McCombs on this record)...
- www.relix.com
2013-11-19
★★★★★
?????????? The genius in indie rocker Cass McComb's latest effort Big Wheel and Others lies in the intricate musical arrangements. The opening, driving "Big Wheel" starts the listener on a musical journey filled with catchy guitar fills poured over a variety of bass lines and backbeats. Perhaps the album's strongest track "There Can Only be One" is a mosaic of guitar parts played over a smoldering groove. McCombs' vocals are unremarkable but in a good way...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2013-11-04
★★★★★
Cass McCombs returns with a double album, drifting around the genre map and proving his prolificacy can't depend on any particular narrative, any overarching marketable story beyond, perhaps, the utilitarian version/vision of songcraft. With that in mind, let's just slap him with the "enigmatic" tag and discuss a few of the more perfect constructions presented here...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2013-10-30
★★★★★
Cass McCombs' weaving narratives flow through the nomadic troubadour's musical apparatuses with the same aplomb and abandon they use to slink the gaps between the vertebrae of the listener. A double album announced two months prior to its release--coming off the twin triumphs of 2011's Wit's End and Humor Risk, no less--Big Wheel and Others represents McCombs' most transient yet memorable volume of song-carved verse yet...
- filtermagazine.com
2013-10-23
★★★★★
Unless you are listening to one of his seven albums, perhaps a little hypnotised by his gifts and the one setting in which everything about Cass McCombs seems to make sense, this artist can seem a perplexing figure. There are few like him; his distaste for all things 'industry' and 'promotion' is well documented, while he categorically refuses to put any of his songs in any sort of context...
- thequietus.com
2013-10-22
★★★★★
"Suffering From Success"
(Cash Money/We the Best/Universal Republic)
Affliction is a luxury, just another thing to flaunt, on "Suffering From Success," the seventh album by DJ Khaled. This shouldn't come as a surprise, though it's a minor deviation from the norm. DJ Khaled, 37, has been one of hip-hop's most dogged purveyors of exultation, which is saying something; his previous albums came with titles like "We the Best," "Victory" and "We the Best Forever...
- www.nytimes.com
2013-10-22
★★★★★
"Suffering From Success"
(Cash Money/We the Best/Universal Republic)
Affliction is a luxury, just another thing to flaunt, on "Suffering From Success," the seventh album by DJ Khaled. This shouldn't come as a surprise, though it's a minor deviation from the norm. DJ Khaled, 37, has been one of hip-hop's most dogged purveyors of exultation, which is saying something; his previous albums came with titles like "We the Best," "Victory" and "We the Best Forever...
- www.nytimes.com
2013-10-23
★★★★★
Cass McCombs is a private, relatively unknowable musician. You have his music--which itself is evasive in its uses of deep melancholy streaked with humor, in the ways in which it shifts shape from album to album--but it doesn't tell you much about him. It's a curious stance in these days of open-source lifestyle, but McCombs stands as an interesting lesson: albums won't necessarily tell us about their creators, and they don't need to if they wish to be revealing...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-10-22
★★★★★
Alright; Cass McCombs' career to date has basically been a long series of feints. Whether it's outlining his own origin myth, kicking off his first album proper by dying in a hospital, or weighing down a nigh perfect album with maybe the most irritating song anyone's written this decade, he's done as much as he can in his power to make sure he's out of reach, let alone someone your dad might come across in a copy of MOJO...
- www.tinymixtapes.com
2013-10-18
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