Mangy Love is McCombs' eighth studio album and may be his best music to date. The instrumental flourishes are lush and supple, spinning into strange territories of groovy country, psychedelic folk, and heady soft rock. The compositions are playful and soulful, while the fluid guitars, swerving bass lines, and fulsome horns seemingly contradict his hangman's humor. Because bubbling underneath it all is McCombs' trademark pathos, this time capturing both political and personal unease.
The opening track rolls over its repeated refrain of bum bum bum, underscoring the strangeness of a world constantly at war with itself. McCombs' writing is oblique but politically potent. "Sent a letter to my congressman / The Ku Klux Klan / From my pierced hands / Bum bum bum / They sent me back an Apple phone / A fine-hair comb / And a bell tolled / Bum bum bum." His descriptions are Dylan-esque, and perhaps no song better captured the unnerving election atmosphere that many felt across the country.
"Opposite House" is an all-around glorious track accompanied by Angel Olsen's chorus refrain, as McCombs struggles with the fact that "when it rains inside / there is nowhere to hide / which is why I'm all sunshine." "Laughter is the Best Medicine," with its allusions to "sugar and spice and everything weird," attempts to deal with his seemingly cosmic bad luck.
McComb's lyrics reach confrontational transcendence on "Cry." It is difficult to tell if he is addressing his one-time lover or all of us "lost in bad poetry, lost in logic, lost in a racist bourgeois town."
No more cliche songs
Nothing less than every ounce of your heart
Though horses could easily pull me apart
No rhetoric and no gold for bards
Digging for carrots in the moonlight like an immigrant
Tearing through plastic bags like an addict
You tell me one thing and do the other--that's weird!
Are you still listening?
I can't do nothing for you, can't you see I have no feet?
We're like two peas in a pod--Netflix and die.
Go on and cry!
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