FEATURE: Cake

“I didn’t take it for granted that there was so much consumption. It seemed crazy to me, sort of excessive, even as a child.”

From their 1994 debut album, Motorcade of Generosity, to their recently released sixth outing, Showroom of Compassion, alt-rock outfit Cake have displayed an obsession with cars.

Rather than celebrating the great American automobile, a la the Beach Boys’ Little Deuce Coupe or I Get Around, the Sacramento, California, band explored the darker side of driving via songs like Long Line of Cars, Carbon Monoxide or 1996 breakthrough single The Distance.

The current album contains another paean to the collision of consumption and the environment, titled Easy to Crash.

“It always blew my mind, even as a child, that everyone is just travelling around here and there, ” singer John McCrea says from his home in Oakland, California.

“I didn’t take it for granted that there was so much consumption. It seemed crazy to me, sort of excessive, even as a child.”

Cake are trying to lead by example, recording Showroom of Compassion — their first album in seven years — in their own solar electric-powered studio, which they built in a two-bedroom house in Sacramento.

McCrea, who recently installed solar panels on his home, explains that the band wriggled free of the major label system after 2004’s Pressure Chief and took the time to set up the studio.

Showroom completes a full circle back to the band’s debut; Motorcade was self-made and self-released, before finding fans via college radio and then a recording deal.

“We learned the hard way here and there that other people don’t really understand us very well and we should probably do everything ourselves, ” chuckles McCrea, who is far from bitter about the band’s time with the majors.

He says, for the most part, they left the quirky rockers to their own devices.

“They pretty much took a hands-off approach with us and didn’t try to dress us up in funny leather jackets. It was always ‘These guys are weird, but they’re selling records — let’s leave them alone’.”

Showroom of Compassion sees Cake stretching their legs and showing off their considerable talents.

While Xan McCurdy and Gabriel Nelson create white funk rhythms and Vincet DiFiore cuts through the rock textures with his trumpet “like a mouthful of glass” (as Time Magazine put it), McCrea delivers the idiosyncratic lyrics in his equally idiosyncratic, sardonic sprechstimme.

Cake has toured the US since late last year to promote the new album, travelling on a biodiesel fuel bus and banning plastic bottles.

McCrea, who has always had “mixed feelings” about touring, says the unavoidable environmental impact of air travel makes it difficult to reconcile an Australian visit with their green principles.

“I suppose we could take a boat there. Maybe the thing to do would be to have a cruise and then play for however long it would take to get to Australia.”
SIMON COLLINS

THE PLUG Showroom of Compassion is out now