Album Of The Week: Courtney Barnett The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas

This week, in this space, I expected to be writing about Big Wheel And Others, the sprawling new double-album from Cass McCombs, one of the greatest songwriters currently existing in the indie rock universe. And Big Wheel And Others is, in a lot of ways, a very good album. In a lot of ways -- and some of the same ones -- it's also a bit of a mess. It's McCombs's loosest, jammiest record by far, and it's no accident that the bass player from Phish shows up. And it also works in a wispy, drifting-across-landscapes sort of way, like the whole thing is McCombs's attempt to write songs for a nonexistent auteurist '70s movie, possibly one that stars Harry Dean Stanton or Ryan O'Neal. And after a few weeks with the album, I still haven't quite found a way in. I love bits, pieces, individual moments, but the whole thing just sort of floats past me when I try to grab it. I could still find a way in; in fact, I expect to. An album like that exists to be heard, put aside, rediscovered later; it strikes me as the sort of album where a half-remembered song will take on a sudden resonance after, say, a deer makes eye contact with you from across a field in a certain way. So instead, I'm finding myself writing about another loose, jammy '70s-sounding album with an oddly mechanical descriptive title from a lyrically sharp-but-elusive singer-songwriter. Sometimes life is like that.