HEARTMIND

Heartmind is an eight-song album that feels like a journey among assorted tuneful feelings, somehow shaped to meet whatever it is a particular listener needs, to mirror whatever they bring to these uniformly incandescent and tragicomic tracks. Cass McCombs has set the stage, and allows the listener to pick the heroes and villains, the winners and losers, the jokes and the drags. He doesn't want to present all the questions, let alone the answers. Cass recorded these songs in multiple sessions on both coasts, in Brooklyn and Burbank, co-producing with Shahzad Ismaily, Buddy Ross, and Ariel Rechtshaid-now a dozen years into his collaboration with Cass beginning with 2009's Catacombs. Rob Schnapf (who previously produced Cass' ANTI- debut, Mangy Love) mixed and merged it all. Where some may hear dark humour, others might hear relentless pain; where some may hear winning cynicism, others might hear harrowing nihilism. Cass writes songs that speak of his moment, and then lets everyone else decide how or even if they speak to their moment. These are honest offerings for absurdist times, funny confessions of frailty amid circumstances that often seem too tense for even the humble chuckle.