"Cake - Pressure Chief"

I must admit, when I first heard samples of the 11 songs on Cake's fifth album, I was apprehensive. The classic Cake sound was there, but it was so much more processed and sequenced, all drum loops and hip-hop beats, electronic squiggles and almost-buried guitars. I feared that Cake had just abandoned any semblance of decent music and gone off in a weird direction.

To say that I was pleasantly surprised by the album, then, would be a fair and accurate statement. Cake's sound is more processed, but it works in their favor. Their early albums had a ragged, live-in-the-studio feel to them--stuttering drums, sloppily-strummed guitars, and vocals that occasionally faded to the background a little when John McCrea moved a bit away from the microphone. But with the departure of their regular drummer, Cake had to rely either on drum machines or guest drummers for Pressure Chief, and that necessity pushed them into a slight sonic evolution.

The vintage Cake sound is still there, complete with "ah yeah"s and "hey"s. The tunes build on that trademark sound, expanding it with synths, drum loops, and tight playing. That's really the key difference between this record and earlier Cake albums--the performance has tightened up considerably, and the musicians are no longer just goofing around and jamming, but playing well-constructed postmodern rock.

The smirk is still in the lyrics and vocal delivery. John McCrea turns an interesting phrase, and his lyrics are very strong on this album (I found most of the lyrics off Cake's previous effort, Comfort Eagle, to be a little weak). His half-spoken vocal stylings fit the music perfectly, and the words are funny, whimsical, wry, and literate. The opener, "Wheels," features one of the more amusing and thoughtful verses in recent music: "In a seedy karaoke bar on the banks of the mighty Bospherous/Is a Japanese man in a business suit sings 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'/And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French-Canadians/while the overweight Americans wear their patriotic jumpsuits."

Other songs of interest include a cover of Bread's "The Guitar Man" that works surprisingly well as a postmodern reinterpretation of the tune; "Carbon Monoxide" is a great punk-rock tune; "She'll Hang the Baskets," "Take it All Away," "Palm of Your Hand," and "Tougher Than it Is" are classic Cake. The only song I really don't care for (and it's not so much a dislike as a feeling that the song could become annoying very easily) is "No Phone," which is something of a re-write of Prolonging the Magic's "Never There." But the complaint with that song is negligible at best, and when only one song in eleven isn't instantly likeable (and it's not that it's a bad song, mind, just that I think I'd become annoyed if I heard it too much in too short a time), that's pretty high praise.

Ultimately, Pressure Chief is an excellent album full of memorable tunes, great hooks, and all that you expect from Cake. My only real concern is the "Anti-Piracy" label it carries on it. I don't know if this means it cannot be copied, or if they're just attempting to discourage piracy, or if it's something the label itself did, but it's an annoyingly large label that is on both the disc itself and the back cover. I also don't know if this means it won't play in a computer--I know it didn't play in mine, but my CD-ROM drive doesn't always cooperate, so that may be unrelated. On the positive side, the CD case inserts are printed on recycled paper, which is always nice.

Anyway, give Pressure Chief a shot, especially if you like any of Cake's stuff. The sound has changed a bit, but it's still most definitely Cake.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Cake, "Carbon Monoxide"