Icing on a Cake

Cake - Fashion Nugget

Volcano (Capricorn), 1996

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Not only is this album good, but it's charming, too. It's unique. It rocks. It's calm and it has groove. Cake is one of the very few bands that seem to have created a genre completely on their own and then managed to stay there all alone for over ten years. While Motorcade of Generosity, their first album, certainly wasn't bad, it was Fashoin Nugget where Cake really solidified, matured, and gained enough ground to feel comfortable singing and playing cocky songs (and actually deserve to as well).

Freshman year of high school, and I'm sitting in a wasted band class with Josh and Rick my high school friends, talking about maybe joining BMG by peeling out and licking and sticking like twelve of those little stickers with pictures of albums on them. I already had Sublime and Stone Temple Pilots and Tripping Daisy and Green Day. Josh said something about me maybe liking Cake, and then Rick argued with him about how Cake sucks.

Then a year later, I borrowed Rick's copy of Fashion Nugget that he had since grown to love. Instant classic. Instant freaking classic. Here's why.

The Mix: This album is mixed well. It's simple with enough layers that there are actually details to listen for. It's full of space instead of mashed in crunchy guitars or seeping in electronic keyboards. The guitar is pushed waaay back so you can hear everything else, and it's all scratchy like nothing you've ever heard for rythym or lead. There's enough space that you can hear past the melody and really hear everything that's going on.

The Performance: This is before Cake relied on electronic beats, so everything sounds sort of live, giving a feel that the performers are actually reacting to each other. Yeah, cohesion. The bassist is stellar and instantly recognizeable. He's all over the place except outside of the chord. The guitars have soul and funk and rock and country and really whatever feel is really needed while retaining a signature sound and feel. Influences span the whole of music but create something singular and bizarely unique.

The Vocals: Cake's music, even their later, blippy, thumpy, buzzy music, really relies on vocals to pull everything through. McCrea has a way of slicing through melodies and time to give you an idea of what he should be singing. "Excessive vamping," the Music Genome Project calls it.

The Lyrics: It has always bugged me that Allmusic.com's totally negative review refers to the lyrics as "Sophomoric jokes that rely on self-consciously elaborate wordplay." They seem to think that Cake has a superiority complex. Turns out they were just trying to entertain. Besides, who else would use phrases like "surene, translucent lake" or "an ancient radiation that haunts dismembered constellations?" And it's imagery. That's a poetry thing. The words he uses convey ideas not explicity stated, but are instead hinted at. It's not a sin to sound smart or creative. Or should they be singing "Hot Legs" and using the word baby as often as possible?

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At first I didn't really know what to say about this album. I like it so much that there's no chance of hearing it anew and objectively. So there it is.

I never could figure out why my parents don't like Fashion Nugget. They should. They really don't know what they're missing.