Lo-fi. Alternative. Rock combo. No matter what they’re
dubbed, Cake will deliver the freewheeling, organic sound
they’re known for from the Royce Hall stage May 4.
With openers Robbers on High Street (New York) and Gomez (U.K.),
this performance is part of the Virgin College Mega Tour, the
second annual spring tour launched across American universities by
the Virgin Mega Store.
Cake has been on tour for the past nine months to promote their
album released in October 2004, “Pressure Chief.” As
the 10-year mark of their existence as a band, “Pressure
Chief” locks the group together, retaining the quirky
sardonicism of their music, as well as the dry wit inescapable in
front-man John McCrea’s sharp tongue and speak-singing
vocals.
“We’ve been sounding pretty tight, musically,”
said Vince DiFiore, Cake trumpeter. “We haven’t tried
to change things at all. We haven’t departed from that
ensemble sound because it’s part of the system that works. We
have a good song at the middle of everything and then arrangements
around that song.”
With “Pressure Chief,” the members of Cake took the
recording process into their own hands. They transformed a
two-bedroom house into their personal recording studio, engineering
their work in addition to keeping their long-term status as
producers.
“If anything has changed about our set-up, we’ve
learned how to work together better in the studio,” DiFiore
said. “It kept everybody busy, kept all of our minds active.
It made the music even more vibrant because of all the focus we had
to have on the project.”
The new record also integrates the band’s members more
tightly than before.
“I’ve always done harmony vocals, but on this
record, we have the whole band doing background vocals more than
ever,” DiFiore said. “We also first brought keyboards
and synthesizers into the band when “˜The Distance’ was
recorded and realized after that, we could really pull out all the
songs on keyboards. I’ve got my hands free, and since you
can’t have the trumpet all the way through every song,
I’ve got the bass to play the keyboard part live.”
Touring and promoting across the United States for almost a
year, Cake has had its fair share of roadside drama.
“It’s been raining a lot on this tour, raining like
crazy,” DiFiore said.
“We ended up doing some numbers acoustically for the
audience while the crew figured things out with the PA system.
We’ve also been traveling by tour bus for awhile, and there
are certain codes of conduct with the tour bus that everyone learns
to live by. We’re pretty disciplined about doing the right
thing and respecting others on the road.”
Touring issues aside, every band faces the scrutiny cast by
critics and music fans.
In the middle of the ever-evolving music scene, Cake is known
for being plugged into, and promptly lifted off, genre labels. The
aesthetic of the “rock hard” mantra, however, is
something the band casts away, according to DiFiore.
“Rocking too hard and losing our balance would not be good
for our music,” DiFiore said. “We don’t rock out
for just rocking out’s sake ““ we come up with a good
arrangement and put energy behind it. But if anyone ever compared
us to Hank Williams Sr. or AC/DC, we wouldn’t be offended by
that.”
As DiFiore explaines, the band tries to edge away from any
affiliation with the indie-rock scene as well.
“We’re not a part of any movement. That’s just
a lazy way to think of things. People are always looking for
categories because that’s sort of the mental process of
analyzing the music scene. Aside from the music, there’s a
lot of critique and a lot of audiophiles out there trying to make
sense of everything. We’re just trying to do our own
thing,” he said.
In its Royce Hall performance, Cake plans to draw selections
from all five of its albums to keep the set list fresh while
acknowledging the loyalty fans have toward their earlier work. They
will try to incorporate the audience into the show by asking the
crowd to participate in several songs.
“We hope a lot of people sing along,” said DiFiore.
“It’s inspiring for the band and fun for the audience.
The theater sounds great when people take part in the sing-along
parts in the song.”