C/D: Cake

They were alright, but their schtick all sounds the same.

What I heard from the last album wasn't as good. Sounded a bit more serious. Not good.

There are some pearls amongst the swine, though. "The Distance" and especially "Short Skirt Long Jacket". "Fashion Nugget" is a painfully shit album though, as proven by the continual playings of it my ex-flatmate forced us to sit through.

Not sure what this means. I like Cake, and I really don't think the other bands I like would make your first-draft list of "the sort of other music their fans listen to."

Favorite song: "Comfort Eagle," from the album of the same name. Very funny.

The scene where Homer thinks up a rap for his Mr. Plow ad on The Simpsons is key for understanding this genre.

Potential dad-rap superstar once he stops drinking the pimp juice: Nelly.

sang about sexual relationships with novel, concrete nouns. see "Sex & Candy."

The dude who sings for Cake meets Tom Tomorrow.

i never really got these guys.

really just a case of "I haven't heard enough of their material". nothing of theirs really made me jump out of their chair but it wasn't bad either.

I never liked "The Distance" but "Never There" was pretty catchy.

I just listened to a few of their tunes and I dunno, it just made me want to listen to Pavement or even Malkmus solo.

I think there were a few months in 1994 where Motorcade of Generosity was my favorite album.

that's a really fun album. I actually think the single "Rock n' Roll Lifestyle" is the weakest track.

Cake are one of those bands where I own one album (in this case Fashion Nugget,) but never felt the desire to acquire more. Maybe I should check Motorcade out. I really like the sounds the guitarist, Greg Brown, got but he left after the second album. I may have opined in some other thread, they remind me somewhat of Wall of Voodoo, wise-guy talk-singer fronting a weirdly ramshackle band.

just here imagining a CAKE version of Boogie Nights where the drug deal is going down and some asshole is in the background just hammering on the vibraslap

that's kind of what it feels like to listen to CAKE albums

remember visiting my brother in college and cycling through his cd collection and finding "prolonging the magic" in his collection. gave him grief about if you're going to have a generic cake album it should be "fashion nugget".

would poll their album titles.

There are surely only a very small number of songs with vibraslap, with one being Rush's "Closer to the Heart," another couple being "Crazy Train" and Supertramp's "Logical Song," and most of the rest being Cake.

I often play drums for a dude who owns a vibraslap JUST to play "Never There." The other essential vibraslap song is "Light of the World" from Godspell.

Similarly the slapstick: it appears in "Sleigh Ride" and "Rawhide." Same dude I frequently perform with also does "Rawhide."

So if he shows up at a gig with those percussion items I know what I'm in for. I don't personally need to own either, because no one else asks for those tunes.

For a while I kept a cowbell handy just in case someone wanted to do "Funky Cold Medina" or (of course) "Don't Fear the Reaper." For a while I used a cowbell on "Tainted Love," until someone - bless them - FINALLY leaned over to me at the bar and said "Less cowbell."

There's another dude I play with who always does "Dancing Queen." I keep a tambourine in the car just in case he's playing. The joke is that I only play tambourine for the part where the lyrics go "feel the beat from the tambourine."

Lastly, I used to have a guiro and a cabasa just in case someone wanted to do "Do It Again" or "Low Rider," plus claves for "Iko Iko." None of those songs have come up in recent years, so I don't know where those instruments are.

For a while I used a cowbell on "Tainted Love," until someone - bless them - FINALLY leaned over to me at the bar and said "Less cowbell."

lmao did you use it as a replacement for that famous synth bit

The thing with Cake is they have so many distinctive sounds and quirks - both the lead vocals and backing vocals have their own style, plus there's the trumpet, weirdly gnarly guitar riffs, and of course the damn vibraslap, so when you hear other bands do these things all I can think of is Cake. like any rock song with a muted trumpet in it is gonna make me think of them.

a few months ago I saw this cover band do "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" and it was really fun watching them struggle to get all the timings right. it's got like this anti-groove to it. bits of the chorus just don't stick together. the other day I was thinking about the song "Shadow Stabbing" and how it manages to be so strangely catchy despite not really being a coherent tune. idk best way I can describe Cake's style is they're like those cartoonists with a real cool and distinct style and when they get asked about it they just say "oh I dunno, I don't really know how to draw so I kinda bungled into this"

shadow stabbing is a great song. i don't think there is a vibraslap on that, but there are jingle bells(?) and a guiro i think it's called

Frogbs: precisely. It was a bluegrass quartet (mando/guitar/voice/standup bass) that only did 80s covers

in her recent VF video, billie eilish cited Cake as one of her most inspiring influences lately?! guess it's time.

I Googled “Billie Eilish cake” to verify the above… and while I did verify it, I also got quite the set of images:

https://d1ohrx9ht8bvf4.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/15101725/Billie-Eilish-cake-.jpg

I'm also influenced by cake but in my case it's German chocolate

I loved the callback to the Fugs’ “Supergirl” in “SS/LJ” (although the song itself I can kinda live without) and always dug everything about “Comfort Eagle” (the song). Saw them at a festival once & they were p great overall. I feel like if you dig their schtick, having an album of theirs isn’t a bad move. It probably doesn’t matter which album, because they don’t really evolve. Great album titles. If they were more ubiquitous they’d be easy to hate.

Clud? Dudassic? They transcend - or slink beneath - both categories. They just kinda … are.

“They’re good enough! Kinda!”

"Comfort Eagle" is a great song. I always wondered why they didn't do more like it. I think that album is probably their best overall but yeah the first 4 are all pretty similar in quality. Pressure Chief and Showroom of Compassion are pretty spotty though. the cover of Sinatra's "Whats Now is Now" is really great though. Cake just have a way of doing covers where they sound so much like themselves, so they don't come off as novelties or whatever. even "I Will Survive" works, lyrics aside that could be a Cake song

theyre definitely not served by the fact that there were so many acts back then with that same dry sarcastic affect and like one ironic cover of a hip hop or 70s song. i can imagine how younger listeners coming to them with fresh ears and without the context of all the other baggage and embarrassments of the era could get into them.

i never needed more than the first couple albums but the guitars on those were really good. i filed them away with my other musical juvenalia and havent revisited in decades but i feel like they probably hold up better than they seemed at the time.

I saw them on a weird bill with Cheap Trick once and they were pretty good. Which is the video where they just play the new song for people on headphones to show how catchy it is?

It's SS/LJ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5KmB8Laemg

It's nice to see Cake getting some props from zoomers. I saw them on the Unlimited Sunshine tour in 2002, which I think they organized. Amazing bill in retrospect: Cake, De La Soul, Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse

would poll their album titles.

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Wednesday, January 11, 2023 1:07 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Do it!

revisiting their first album is a lotta fun too, it's not recorded particularly well but they stumble on a cool sound. some of the tracks have like this basic bluegrass or samba rhythm with the horns and shouting and gnarly guitar riffing on top, not because this was the sound they were going for but rather because I think this is just all they knew how to do. I know most bands claim "we didn't really know what we were doing, we were just making what we thought sounded cool" and in Cake's case it's definitely true

I just relistened to the first album for the first time in a while and they really stake out their oddball country/mariachi sound from the get-go ("Comanche.") I can see where their musical quirkiness and surrealist lyrics might come off too wacky for some, but I think they're fun, especially when McCrea goes:

AWWWWWWWW...... YEEEAAAHHHHH!

Note: debut actually contains no ironic covers, while their second has three, but I still prefer Fashion Nugget.

One of these days someone's going to do a proper case or article or documentary or something for Sacramento in the 1990s producing some acts that, for lack of a better word, had the last laugh one way or another. Cake and the Deftones are maybe the most obvious of course, but Far had its own impact too, and I'm sure there's more.

xp always liked "perhaps perhaps perhaps" and "sad songs & waltzes" as choices for covers

Luna > Cake

Cake > Sugar Ray

I like Cake's cover of "I Will Survive" but Goldfinger's cover of "99 Red Balloons" > Cake's cover of "I Will Survive"

Yea I don't think "Sad Songs & Waltzes" is supposed to be ironic. "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" maybe but I also dig how they fit it so snugly into their own template. I knew a bunch of people with that album and I don't think anyone knew it was a cover.

Cake & Ben Folds Five have aged way better than the other staples of my mid-late '90s local alt rock radio station.

Speaking of covers, this one is great from them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDJgwUeW7_k

xxp as a dork listing to a lot of 50s records at the time, i ID'd "perhaps" as a cover but didnt know "sad songs" wasnt a cake original until many years later

that's what makes 'em cool, I think if you didn't know any of the originals you wouldn't be able to identify which songs were covers. outside of "War Pigs" I guess. even the cover of "Mahna Mahna" feels like it could've been one of their quirky instrumental things

and I Will Survive

well ok that one because the lyrics are very distinct and direct in a way Cake songs usually ain't. but if you replaced them....well ok that's a useless thought experiment because I think at that point it's just a different song

personally I reckon I'd choose "She'll Come Back to Me", "Let Me Go" and "Hem of Your Garment"

This is probably one for the controversial opinions thread but I like Cake's "I Will Survive" more than Gloria Gaynor's. Which probably has to do with being 10 years old when the Cake cover came out and hearing it before the original. I think it holds up as top-shelf alt-rock sleaze, but I get why it rubs some people the wrong way

Co-sign.
(I was 23, so I don't even have that excuse, but I'm pretty sure disco still officially sucked in 1995)

y'all should listen to the "What's Now Is Now" cover, as much as I wasn't so much digging the last album I still play this track a bunch

All I know is my wife sang "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" at a karaoke thing we went to and I fell in love with her all over again.

Luna > Cake

Cake > Sugar Ray

― everybody was tofu fighting (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 13 January 2023 18:24 (yesterday) link

now this is an ILM debate i want see

I swear theres some kind of Mandala Effect thing going on with Prolonging the Magic. After I ruined my original CD I bought a used copy which I thought must've been some early promo or something because it had choppily edited versions of You Turn the Screws and Sheep Go to Heaven on it. Plus Hem of Your Garment was a completely different take, almost like a demo version. I tried looking online but there was no indication that there were 2 different versions of this CD around, so I figured I'd just stumbled upon something rare (but you know, in a worthless sort of way). Anyway I just picked up the vinyl and it has the edited versions!! Almost makes me question if the original version existed at all. Like the whole jam section of Sheep is just edited out. It's so weird that's the one they chose to reissue. Unless the folks in charge just didn't know what they were doing.

the typo in your post made me think of an elaborate, Truman Show-style prank wherein all references online to the Mandela effect would be replaced with Mandala, the Sanskrit word for "circle", and we would all agree to claim that the term has always been a reference to ancient Hindu philosophy, and those who claim it's a reference to the South African anti-apartheid leader are experiencing the "Mandala effect"

I spent a Japan to US flight listening to cake because my almost gf liked them
It was good!
Haven’t heard them since then

so as long as I'm posting about Prolonging the Magic, I remember buying this at 13 and playing it for my Dad. I was really sure he would like it but instead he said something like "I can't stand this singer, he's so bad at carrying a tune". which bothered me because my opinion was that he could carry a tune just enough that people could effortlessly sing along. but I'm listening now and you know what, he was right. he's writing more proper tunes here and it's making his voice wanna do things it just can't. I still like it though. I actually think the new guitarist they got here was way more rad.