Click to listen to Cake's Showroom Of Compassion
Cake graduated from the same Nineties class of alt-rock oddballs that produced Beck and Weezer. But where their contemporaries evolved or died, they've stayed true to the same droll sound (and not unsuccessfully; Cake songs are weirdly ubiquitous in movie and TV comedies). Their sixth disc has the usual whirring keyboards and winking mariachi horns, all subject to John McCrea's satiric sing-talking. He lays into hipsters, guys with mustaches and Angelenos, tempering his derision with pathos. "I need a hideaway," he sings on the Seventies-rocking "Sick of You." It's a quirky, cloistered approach, and McCrea's sticking with it.
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