Pressure Chief

Cake

(Sony Records)

Cake’s offhand cultural awareness and deadpan irony have once again become a theme on Cake’s new album, Pressure Chief, the fifth of their career. In concert at the Orpheum October 7th, McCrea debuted “No Phone,” the second track off the new disc, to an audience filled with adoration for his trademark mordant social rants. “No Phone,” along with various other tracks off the new album, denounce technology and urban culture with a blander-than-usual strain of Cake’s signature social criticism. The tracks make use of the cultural consciousness that Cake fans crave, and that McCrea obviously still has, although their delivery on the CD pales in comparison to the caustic tunes of Cake’s earlier days.

While in concept the new album is worthy of the Cake name, the songs themselves have lost the power of past albums. The band has adopted a more pop sound that makes the fith track, “Carbon Monoxide,” written about public transportation in L.A., sound like a Green Day creation. Against a setlist of old and new from Cake, their newest tracks brought out power chords that only add to the band’s changing face. The new sound is not only the fault of a bassline-in-hiding and weak hooks, but of the tragic diminution of McCrea’s powerful, rhythmic vocals. His clear baritone, once the centerpiece of Cake’s sound, is at times weakly melodic and sometimes buried in mediocre guitar riffs. Notable exceptions are the catchy “Waiting” and a cover of Bread’s “The Guitar Man,” as well as the impressive “She’ll Hang the Baskets,” all of which recall McCrea’s commanding vocal presence.

The sold-out show’s orchestra and balcony levels filled with a variety of fans. They ranged from the predominantly college-aged crew to older fans, who might have caught onto the band’s work in the early 90s. There were punks and indie fans. There were very few as old as McCrea, but most seemed to know the words to songs released as early as 1994. While “Pressure Chief” marks a significant turn in the band’s evolution, old fans can still cling to their old work, while a newer audience discovers the band.

—Eve Lebwohl

Frank Black Francis

Frank Black

(SpinArt Start Records)

Since every one of the songs on Frank Black Francis was previously recorded, and in almost every instance more memorably, by the Pixies during Mr. Black Francis/Frank Black’s original tenure with the group, none of the songs on the new double-album—which bookends the Pixies’ career Phase I—is destined to be a revelation. Disc One contains fifteen demos recorded by Mr. Francis (perhaps apocryphally) the day before the Pixies went into the studio to record their debut Come On Pilgrim; Disc Two offers almost as many remakes of Pixies songs recorded by Mr. Black just before the since-much-talked-about reunion. Disc One is, at most levels, what one might expect almost any demo tape to sound like: the pleasure here comes almost exclusively from the post-hoc knowledge of the songs’ evolution. The utterly bassless “I’ve Been Tired” and “Ed is Dead” are surprisingly intriguing, and “Nimrod’s Son” and “I’m Amazed” are particularly delightful for the way they demonstrate how much electricity was in them from the start. But there’s often a good reason demos aren’t released until long after a band’s critical acclaim is chiseled into the edifice. It’s not that these are bad, but the oft-quipped music-lover’s adage that “if you’re not already a fan...” holds true here.

Given the bareboned feel of Disc One, Disc Two is startlingly, well, boned; if One is proto-Pixies, Two is plush-parallel-universe Pixies. Gone is the ruggedness of even the originals’ instrumentation, replaced instead by electronic tones and effects slipped over unexpected delay-echoed muted horns and muffled acousto-electric guitars. “The Holiday Song” and “Is She Weird?” are particularly affected by these new arrangements, though in the case of the latter, and elsewhere, only moderately effective. Mr. Black was assisted in the Disc Two project by art-punkers Two Pale Boys, and it is evident in the musical production that he (and they) took great delight in refashioning Black Francis’s songs into Frank Black’s covers. Where it isn’t always evident, unfortunately, is in the vocals, often coming across as either weak or too ornamental given the song material, and at times (“Where is My Mind?”) just plain silly. Particularly excessive is the disc’s final, whopping, fifteen-minute version of “Planet of Sound,” which expands the whirlwind-punch of the two-minute original into a lumbering hurricane (the phrase “fucking around” is repeated over forty-two times). With a few debatable moments, none of these songs is really better than the original version, and though Disc Two has more for a non-devotee to appreciate than Disc One, Frank Black Francis is ultimately at heart a showcase for Mr. Black to battle his Pixie and non-Pixie musical personae, which is cool if you know the fighters, but will leave you little cold if you’re outside looking in.

—Drew Ashwood

Power

Q And Not U

(Dischord Records)

It’s not entirely clear to me whether the best way to describe Q and Not U’s latest is as “post-punk that lacks conviction” or “dance-punk that fails to make you want to dance.” All academic labeling aside, however—the quartet-now-trio (their bassist left after the first album) hailing from DC and on Dischord Records falls short in its third attempt at a “new sound” in as many albums. After their first album, No Kill No Beep Beep, which showed some positive post-hardcore influences, their second album (sans bassist), Different Damage, softened up a bit on some tracks (“Soft Pyramids”), but elsewhere managed to get a bit more dance-y ( “Black Plastic Bag”). Power, unfortunately, lacks any of the redeeming qualities of their first two attempts. After an opening track (“Wonderful People”) that sounds as if they can’t decide whether the sound they want to go for is more of an imitation of the Moving Units, the Faint or Michael Jackson, the album keeps sliding downhill.

While some bands excel at pulling off a sound that is consistently bad, this album manages to be bad in an impressively divisive array of different vibes and song structures—though the falsetto vocals serves as the bedrock of vapidity that they continue to fall back on throughout the songs. While “7 Daughters” starts out with potentially awesome-sounding Nintendo tracking, the boring song structures and hipster vocals fail to move anywhere. The song “X-Polynation” shows the potential to be a people-mover with its initial driving beat and idiosyncratically spastic flute, but crashes down as the band takes a trip to New York with their generic imitation-Rapture-or-other-New-York-Hipster-Band vocals; the mediocre rock tune, “Collect the Diamonds” is annoying way past the initial irritating line in which a DC band sings about people “standing in a queue.”

One of the more interesting highlights of the album is the quietly interesting electronic sounds in the background of “Beautiful Beats,” which serve however only to frustrate, because it is a testament to the fact that the band is capable of making interesting music, if only they could get past their overactive sense of hipness and sadly atrophied conception of genuine innovation and feeling. At the risk of telling you what you’ve probably already heard, listen to their first album, where they actually manage to rock a bit—or if you must, listen to their second album, where they generally pull off the dance-punk vibe much better. The long term solution, though, is to avoid the band altogether and throw on some Black Eyes instead.

—Jim Fingal