First thought – fucking hell, are these still going? From my recollection, CAKE were a band recommended to me by people with music taste I didn’t respect that much. The prospect of a b-sides and rarities release, then, was hardly the most enticing on the pile.
It kickstarts with a clutch of covers – ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath, ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town’ by Mel Tillis, and most shockingly ‘Mahna, Mahna.’ All in the laidback country/frat-rock style that someone must know and love them for.
Oh, it’s dreary. Dreary like that Uncle Kracker hit from a few years ago. It would go in the hypothetical record collection next to The Mavericks, Sheryl Crow and other such mildly acclaimed but painfully dull monsters of bland. It’s predominantly covers, where the only entertainment is identifying the original and thinking how the soul has been kidnapped, taken to some roadside bar on some mid-Western dirt-track and made to listen to some half-soaked barfly twitter on until it can’t continue any more.
‘Strangers in the Night’ is a lounge cover, by which point my reviewers instincts are to turn this off completely and just dish out the bad review without any further thought. It’s a delivery that almost makes you yearn for the Robbie Williams swing album to come back, with added forgiveness. The whole album is tinged with sepia, some sort of retirement home shuffle of the future.
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It’s not like the covers are remarkably different, they’re just given the stereotypical Cake sound, which is AOR country rock without an ounce of feeling. I don’t know whether it’s meant to be tongue in cheek, but even in that context, wilting laments like ‘Multiply the Heartaches’ are closer to impotence than they are to anything truly alternative.
Proof positive that on the whole B-sides are second rate and covers are for bands without enough material to fill up an average EP. These exercises have only ever been for the die-hard fan only, which takes the pressure off me somewhat when it comes to enjoyment. In these times of recession, I could name nine billion better things to spend your money on.
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