Cake - 'Pressure Chief' (Columbia)
3/5
By: Thomas Hannan
It's very, very easy to just not get Cake. Despite some undeniably catchy assaults, one classic single (come on, you loved 'The Distance' too, right?), their status as a proper band who play instruments and, y'know, have beards and stuff, there's still something about them that at all times comes across as a joke. The name. The keyboard sounds. The trumpets. The whole damn aesthetic. Are we meant to take this seriously? Does it even matter?
Probably not. They're a band that seems to spend a good seventy percent of their albums conjuring songs that, months on, you still won't know whether you actually take pleasure in or are annoyed by. Somehow, there's some perverse entertainment in that. 'Pressure Chief' signals no real departure; it still leaves Cake in a game of their own, be that a good thing or a very puzzling, perhaps unfortunate one.
It starts very well, gets very bad instantly afterwards and then milks a thin line between the two for the next nine tracks. 'Wheels' is the kind of song of theirs you can take seriously, it's got their trademark country bounce, the incessantly harmonised vocals, those signature trumpet blasts - but it's a proper song, a bit creepy, almost like Pavement if they'd have spent more time winking. But then 'No Phone' - the most half-hearted attempt at blasting modern living possible - brings us crashing down. Unnecessary - and that's all we'll say about it if you don't mind.
Following that, it becomes very difficult to properly hate, even more difficult to love, easy to be slightly amused by and all too tempting to be thoroughly irritated by. A lot of the time, the songs themselves aren't half bad, but are modified in such a way that takes all the heart out of them. 'Take It All Away', for example, has the makings of something we could respect, but it's things such as that unnecessarily fuzzy computerised bass line and completely out of place swagger that add nothing to it. And the omnipresent synthesised string plucks - why? Why, Cake? (Apologies for the two 'why's - we really can't figure this one out). 'Dime' too suffers a similar fate, except this one has a tuneful chorus of much higher powers, making its self-imposed flaws all the more exasperating.
Sometimes it does just go wrong, however. No excuses. 'Carbon Monoxide' shouldn't really have left the notepad, and 'Palm Of The Hand' sounds like Cake covering one of their own songs (Bonnie 'Prince' Billy gets away with it somehow; these guys don't). But as if purely to confuse us further, there are a couple more moments of reprise from all the silliness that prompt us to ponder if we've got this all wrong - the pinnacle of the mess of ideas in 'Waiting', the 'proper song', Beck-like shuffle of 'Tougher Than It Is' and the incredibly welcome starkness of 'End Of The Movie' all throwing some spanners into the works of the idea that this is a dreadful record.
Which it isn't, by any means - in places it's rather charming. Largely though, 'Pressure Chief' is an album composed of decent songs lacking only a lesson in the following school of thought - just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Artists in this article: Cake
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