Having previously been irritated beyond bearing by a couple of their singles, your reviewer had given Sacramento's CAKE a wide berth. Repeated exposure to their fifth album "Pressure Chief" suggests this was a wise move all along.
Because while this writer's been involved in long distance musical love affairs with the oddball likes of David Byrne and Andy Partridge for many years, there's just something too horribly nauseating about Cake's frontman John McCrea's songs to even allow them to sneak in on the quirky ticket.
Jaunty opener "Wheels" gives you some idea of what we're fighting off here. Yes, it's bright, poppy and excretes melody like an unholy amalgam of Neil Finn and They Might Be Giants and even has a storyboard involving "muscular Cyborg German dudes" and "overweight Americans in their patriotic jumpsuits." It's even funny. Once. More than that and it's like being force fed marzipan. Yucko.
"Wheels" is even one of the better tracks, too. In fact, the only other tracks your reviewer finds even remotely tolerable are "Carbon Monoxide" and "She'll Hang The Baskets". The latter is shaped by welcome guest and ex-Green On Red mainstay Chuck Prophet's delicious, dark brown baritone guitars figures and "Carbon Monoxide"s insistent, Guided By Voices lite could be cool until you twig it's an eco-friendly anthem. "Where's the air? where's the air?" cry John and his cohorts, before concluding "don't you care? don't you care?" Fair point, except this writer thought it was actually America who was refusing to sign the Kyoto agreement. Silly me.
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As for the rest, pass me the semtex and detonators please. Indeed, it's more of a question of which song wins the prize for the most depressingly nauseating. "Take It Away"s certainly an early contender. In it, McCrea relates a typical tale of his girl dun gone and suggests she can "take your economy suitcase, take your psycho little dogs" with the passion of someone who can't be bothered to run for the ice cream van. C'mon man, she's going - cry, buy whiskey and pills, kick the bloodhound, but at least sound like you give a shit!
It has tough competition, though, not least from the irritatingly downhome acoustic slice of twaddle known as "End Of The Movie" and the mildly Talking Heads-y "Dime" which melts ignominiously under the weight of that drearily omnipresent Ric Ocasek synth buzz. Aaargh!
But the depths are well and truly plumbed by their redundant cover of Bread's already unspeakably ghastly "The Guitar Man". If you really want me to describe what this sounds like, you truly must be a masochist. Trust me: if you like this, your soul is in jeopardy.
"Pressure Chief", then, simply collapses under the weight of its' own irritating mediocrity. As far as I'm concerned, you can have this Cake and eat it. I don't even want the crumbs.
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