Cake - Showroom Of Compassion

I confess ignorance to Cake.

I don’t think you’re supposed to do that when writing reviews. I mean, it’s somewhat ridiculous to set yourself up as being totally oblivious to a band when you set about writing a review about them. I think the proper thing is just to pretend to know what the hell you’re talking about and then jump right into the foray.

At the same time, I thought it would be bold of me to admit that after a few decades of doing this, Todd Totale has finally gone a listened to his first Cake album.

But there’s this nagging familiarity with all of the band’s album covers. They’re pretty ubiquitous-I swear I see them all around, and there’s this nagging feeling that they take up a lot of space in the “CA” section of the used record store.

Initially, the first few tracks of Showroom of Compassion actually got me to believe that I might have missed something by not checking out this band before, although the first few tracks also convinced me that Cake was the band that performed “The Way” until someone mention that the real authors was Fastway Fastball.

Then I recalled after listening to vocalist John McCrea’s monotone that this was the unit behind “The Distance,” the vague late 90’s hit that I remembered but didn’t pay that much attention to. I think it was played on a movie that my wife liked or something.

“What’s Now Is Now” is where things start to go south. It’s a lukewarm dip into some kind of quirky alterna-MOR mix that is neither ironic, inspiring, or hooky enough to warrant future listening. It’s the kind of filler that even Sean Cassidy would fess up to, even though Cake sounds nothing like any project a Cassidy was associated with.

In fact, Cake doesn’t really hold on to one mold or genre for too long, and it’s apparent that their calculated idiosyncrasy is part of their shtick. They’re like a tamer version of Camper Van Beethoven, with less acid eating and more pot smoking.

They ruin perfectly good ballads with dumb lyrics like “the winter’s chill/chilled me to the bone this year” and pointless trumpets. They work up some phony country baloney during “Bound Away” only to say that they’ve done it.

And they end the album with a novelty song “Italian Guy,” complete with a string trio that compliments either an inside joke/observation about-wait for it-an Italian Guy. It’s odd only in the sense that Cake would spend so much time working on decorating an off-handed song with so much pointless shit-not odd in the way that they really intended it.

When they do it right-like in the opener “Federal Funding,” they make subversive points in their weird approach. Here’s what I learned in the research for this album: there’s a bunch of Cake fans that hate this particular song.

And not a one of them had anything bad to say about the “Italian Guy” song.
How Showroom of Compassion ranks with their fans is pretty straight ahead, with a lot suggesting that this was status-quo Cake material. Some even bitched to that point, questioning why it took so long for this album to be released, particularly when there didn’t seem to be anything new or different compared to their previous output.

Like I said, I’m not the guy when it comes to that complaint, but I can tell you as a novice Cake listener, there was very little for me to get excited about either. While it’s impressive that the band has logged a long time just getting to the point of this release, there’s very little within Showroom of Compassion that motivates me to seek out the albums before it.