RATING: *****
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CAKE
Fashion Nugget
Capricorn Records
1996 [48:16]
by Therese Han
Hel-llo? Are we idiots? Do we have the words "TERRIBLY STUPID - WILL BUY
ANYTHING" written on our foreheads? If not, why do these Cake people
think we'd want to have anything to do with their cruddy music? I mean,
they have a great name, and I spent half an hour just thinking what sort
of cake they named themselves after (Angel Food Cake? Banana Peanut Cake?
Peachy Upside Down Cake?) before putting the cd on and finding out that
they're at the very most, and I'm being charitable here, just a mud pie.
Their singer, John "I could've been Harry Connick Jr but I'm ugly" McCrea
has a beard and a one-octave vocal range, so he just talk-sings and tries
really hard to effect the kind of nonchalant cool that traditionally
centers around the maintenance of facial hair. I want to tell you all
that he sounds exactly like your chemistry teacher attempting to rap
the Periodic Table. And why does he keep going "yah! yah! yah!" for no
apparent reason at all? I mean, did somebody tell him he was the Fugees?
Are we being sold the dub-track for a failed kung fu flick? Or is this,
as I strongly suspect, a paroxysmal case of Beavis&Buttheadivitis?
Puh-lease!
Even worse though, is guitarist Greg "look at me, I can play a one-note
guitar solo like Neil Young" Brown. What a total bonehead! He like
constantly uses these really chunky riffs when some of the songs
on FASHION NUGGET could clearly use a touch of Eric Clapton (I'm thinking
especially about Eric's sound on the Baby Face-produced "Change The World".
Isn't it great the way that song sounds just like Boyz II Men?)
Don't even get me started on that annoying trumpet player they have who
keeps wandering in and out songs like he's from Herp Albert's Marijuana
Brass or somebody. But I have to admit the band has an excellent rhythm
section who are totally funky and have clear hip-hop influences. But why
oh why hide those influences by forcing them to play dinky country songs
like this really old Willie Nelson number they cover. That's right,
folks, Willie Nelson! Omigaawwd! What were they thinking??
But that's not even half as bad as Cake's own unique brand of "lyricism".
Sample this little morsel of bad taste from "The Distance", the single you
might have heard on the radio: "bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and
remorse/assail him, impale him, with monster-truck force." Eeeewwwww!!
Now that sure didn't help my appetite any. If that's supposed to be a
poetic beau geste for these people, I have three words to say - "CREATIVE
WRITING COURSE."
Elsewhere, they're not so content playing dumb and dumber and start being
plainly offensive. "He's got a gold watch/she's got a silk dress/and
healthy breasts/that bounce on his Italian leather sofa" is just one
example of the kind of peurile, unfunny, macho, pig-headed chauvinism
that should rightly outrage any decent and intelligent person. And yet
one supposes it's typical of people who would sing about a land where
"large fuzzy dice still hang proudly like testicles from rearview mirrors."
Hel-llo? Didn't these Freudian exhibitions of the self go out of the
fashion in the last decade? I mean, these guys clearly have a thing or two
to learn from a new age man like Kenny G... sensitivity and instrumental
music spring to mind.
I could go on and on, but I think I'll just let their boorish, four-lettered
version of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" speak for them, living proof as
they are that certain branches of the human race are independently devolving
in a self-created, viciously uncultured, no doubt beer-sodden environment.
It's beyond me how this album, which isn't informed by the either the R&B
sensibilities of TLC or the mainstream rock of the wonderful silverchair,
is currently one of Billboard's Top40 albums. I can only surmise that
there are alot of people out there who have been fooled by these musical
terrorists into thinking that perversity and non-conformism is hip, and
that weirded-out college boys who can hardly play their instruments and
insist on producing their own albums instead of getting a proper producer
(Baby Face could have done wonders for them) deserve to sell more albums
than somebody like Luther Vandross. It's a social travesty, and Cake truly
brings shame to the name of all that is good in sweet confections. This
way to disappointment city, folks...
(Music Editor's note: Some of us actually liked the above-disparaged
"large fuzzy dice like testicles" lyric, and in the spirit of good humour
and universal manhood suffrage heartily give FASHION NUGGET a ****
seal of approval)
Therese Han is a student of behavioural sociology. She is the proud owner of the only Luther Vandross bomber jacket known to exist.
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