Pressure Chief

I love all different sorts of music, but there are two or three bands that I put above most of the rest, and it's always extra-exciting when one of them comes out with a new album. One of my absolute favorites is Cake, and I picked up their latest, Pressure Chief. If you've never heard Cake's music before, they're really hard to shove into a category; about the closest I can come is alterna-bluegrass-country-funk-rock. A few of their songs got a bit of radio airplay; their biggest hit was "The Distance" from 1996's Fashion Nugget. From my experience with them, their albums are great, their concerts less so. I had a chance to go see them a couple years back at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, and was extremely disappointed, though my disappointment had little to do with their performance.

It was a decent crowd, and a lot of people were yelling requests (including me--I wanted to hear "Mr. Mastodon Farm" from their first album). But after a little bit of the first set, their lead singer, John McCrea paused in between songs to say, basically, "We've got our set list planned, so stop yelling requests because we aren't going to play them." Then he got pissed at the crowd later in the show because the crowd wasn't very into the show.

That aside, I still love Cake's music, and I'm really digging this new album. Without a doubt, it's better than Comfort Eagle, although Pressure Chief is nearly as short (just under forty minutes). Acoustically, it sounds a lot more "polished" than the band's earlier works, and that seems to have been a trend as the group goes along. Prolonging the Magic is very quiet, and you have to crank the volume to really hear it. From there, they seem to have increased their production values a little more with every release. And this isn't a bad thing at all. They remain very true to their original sound (and their sound, in turn, is very original). They bring in some interesting instruments from time to time (if I'm not mistaken, I believe I heard the return of the musical saw from Prolonging the Magic). There's not one particular track that jumps out at me as "ready for radio airplay", but I'm especially partial to "Wheels", "Take It All Away" (Cake's take on the breakup song), "Dime" (a really clever song, even before you start thinking about the dime as metaphor), "The Guitar Man" (a great ballad-about-life-in-music), and "End of the Movie" (a song about getting older). A great album--a must-have for Cake fans, and worth a listen for anyone looking for something a little different.