{"id":447,"date":"2011-02-15T05:04:41","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T10:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=447"},"modified":"2026-09-01T15:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T19:37:08","slug":"album-review-cake-showroom-of-compassion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2011\/02\/15\/album-review-cake-showroom-of-compassion\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Cake – Showroom of Compassion"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Cake<\/strong> hit the scene more than a decade and a half ago, I was firmly in the not-impressed camp. John McCrea<\/strong>\u2019s deadpan, atonal vocals left me cold, and the horns felt like a gimmick. They kept at it, though, and gained some critical notice. Like many bands that refused to cater to whatever the flavor-of-the-month style was, they eventually faded from high profile. But in 2011 the group returned with Showroom of Compassion<\/em>, their sixth studio album.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not bad. McCrea hasn\u2019t really grown as a singer \u2013 he does what he does, basically \u2013 but his delivery seems somehow warmer and more assured than in the early days. The band\u2019s understated playing moves the songs along without truly calling attention to the instrumentation. Midtempo grooves like \u201cLong Time\u201d are appealing, and while that damn trumpet is still in the mix, it too is less grating than it once was. (Maybe I\u2019m mellowing with age, but I doubt it.)<\/p>\n

Cake still engages in a stylist grab-bag, throwing their genre influences into a musical blender and hitting the frappe button. Trip-hop and hip-hop beats propel the songs, and sampled (or sampled-sounding) instrumentation drifts in and out of the mix. Production is typically dry, giving Showroom of Compassion<\/em> a recorded-in-the-living-room vibe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s Now is Now\u201d is a hooky offering, full of the same world-weary yet smart-alecky sort of lyrics that Cake has always delivered. Some subtle analog synth \u2013 we\u2019re talking dialed-back Greg Hawkes<\/strong> rather than Rick Wakeman<\/strong> here \u2013 adds some needed melodic interest to the sparely-arranged songs.<\/p>\n

\u201cMustache Man (Wasted)\u201d offers up a fuzzy lead guitar riff and a 70s feel that recalls ZZ Top<\/strong> or \u201cCisco Kid\u201d era War<\/strong>. And some vocal harmonies leaven the surfeit of McCrea vocals (which, it must be said, begin to grate halfway into the disc\u2026if not sooner). But again with the trumpet!<\/p>\n

\u201cTeenage Pregnancy\u201d starts off with a half minute of living-room piano recital styled piano, soon joined by keyboards from the Casio school of sonic approaches. The instrumental is pretty well a keyboard (and trumpet, of course) showcase.<\/p>\n

Seven tracks in, the band delivers what might be a Cake-take on the Rolling Stones<\/strong>, with a guitar riff, um, \u201cinspired\u201d by the Beatles<\/strong>\u2019 \u201cDay Tripper.\u201d With horns, and not the ones from \u201cGot to Get You Into My Life.\u201d If McCrea considered skipping the spoken vocal delivery technique on Showroom of Compassion<\/em> (here\u2019s betting he didn\u2019t), here\u2019s where he gave in.<\/p>\n

Oddly, the album improves as it modestly chugs along. The songs get better, the arrangements improve, and the thing actually (almost) rocks. It\u2019s hard to know if the country pastiche \u201cBound Away\u201d is a piss-take or a heartfelt homage to the style. And in fact that uncertainty is a central source of perplexity when it comes to Cake: are they laughing at \u2013 or with \u2013 the listener? Either way, for those who dig the singular approach of the band, there\u2019s plenty to like on Showroom of Compassion<\/em>. Unless, of course, you hate trumpets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Cake hit the scene more than a decade and a half ago, I was firmly in the not-impressed camp. John McCrea\u2019s deadpan, atonal vocals left me cold, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32343,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/32343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}