Cass McCombs has positioned Humor Risk as the relatively light-hearted companion to the darkly ravishing Wit’s End from earlier this year. Musically, that’s almost true—the pounding drums of “The Same Thing” and the strummy folk-pop of “Robin Egg Blue” are more immediate than the painfully introverted and emotionally choked soft rock of Wit’s End. But lyrically, McCombs still favors pitch-black morality tales that leaven unrelenting fatalism and random tragedy with a world-weary wit. On “The Living Word,” he sets a sweetly romantic melody against a backdrop of philosophers and gurus—including Lao Tzu, Confucius, Ho Chi Minh, and L. Ron Hubbard—meeting up throughout history and laying down destructive belief systems. The grinding rock of “Mystery Mail” tells the story of two boyhood friends who launch a cross-country drug operation and wind up in prison, where the protagonist’s pal ends up “stabbed with a ballpoint pen / about sixty times by his cellmate, Charles.”