Cake has made a solid career for itself largely on the back of its talent for arrangement. What sets Cake apart from the standard rock and roll band has been its ability to bring the right part in at the right time. Phrasing gave the band’s cover of “I Will Survive” its punch. The gathering storm of instruments turned “Long Line of Cars” into something more than a complaint about traffic. Pace changes made you forget that “You Part the Waters” is, at its heart, a literal beg for attention.
The problem here is that none of these songs are on the new album. There’s a cover of “Guitar Man,” but it has no punch. This album’s complaint about traffic, “Carbon Monoxide,” is just a complaint. There’s nothing here that feels fresh or powerful. If ever an album felt like a collection of B-sides and outtakes without actually being an album of B-sides and outtakes, this is it.
Part of the reason this feels like a collection of castoffs is that the play list includes several songs that fit the mold of previous Cake successes. These songs feel like the less catchy cousins of Cake’s greatest hits. That isn’t to say that they are bad songs — and the “Guitar Man” cover has the original’s catchiness to carry it through — but you feel like they ran whatever tunes they had lying around through the same old quirk filters and hit record. To round it out they wrote a couple Cake-by-numbers tunes and threw in a cover. Done.
Still, if “No Phone,” the light-rotation first single, hits you in a way that “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” or “The Distance” didn’t then this might be a nice way to get a feel for Cake’s bag of tricks. I can’t point to a terrible song like the unfortunate title track on Comfort Eagle or “Race Car Ya Yas” from Fashion Nugget. There just isn’t that one song that will make anyone who has another Cake album listen to this more than a few times.
Maybe it was obvious after the band wove elements of opera into several songs on the last album, Comfort Eagle compete with a lead off track featuring a first person account of the trials and views of an opera star. Is it me or is any association between rock and opera the last refuge for a band running out of ideas? Well, for better of worse, the band is out of ideas. Cake isn’t going to go the David Byrne/Paul Simon route of finding a new world music beat to cover the same old routine. They haven’t invited Shaggy to drop a few rhymes. Other than new textures that gives a few tracks a bit of a different feel (melodica, carousel organ), it’s just Cake, and that’s just fine.
The non sequiters — always a Cake signature — are particularly non sequential here, leaving your brain free to focus on the fact that the band has nothing to say — except of course that they hate traffic, being bothered by phone calls and breakups. It’s OK. Cake isn’t supposed to be the main course. Still, what used to a confection that surprised and astounded has become something like a Twinkie — packaged and predictable.
Cake – Pressure Chief
1. Wheels
2. No Phone
3. Take It All Away
4. Dime
5. Carbon Monoxide
6. The Guitar Man
7. Waiting
8. She’ll Hang the Baskets
9. End of the Movie
10. Palm of Your Hand
11. Tougher Than It Is
