The Cakekitchen â Trouble Again in This Town (Ally Records)
Trouble Again in This Town by The Cakekitchen
âJust to Be Your Superheroâ lurches to life with a strident thump of guitar and a rattle of martial snare, its instrumental arrangement at once emphatic and spare, like a picture drawn with a few dark slashing lines against plenty of white space. Graeme Jefferies, he of This Kind of Punishment and Nocturnal Projections and a mainstay of New Zealand experimental music since the 1970s, begins softly, his wavery baritone surrounded with echo and no louder than a sigh, murmuring about crippling depression (âFelt so sad couldnât get out of bed at all, oh poor pitiful meâ).
Then suddenlyâbut if you know any of Jefferies music not unexpectedlyâthe song makes a shift into a louder, denser, more dissonant and triumphant chorus, all of the sudden electric and rock, as Jefferies declaims, âI walked LA to Amsterdam/I fly Munich to Rome/I swim Oslo to Birmingham/just to be your superhero.â The shift from sad bunny indie pop to swaggering rock happens several times during the songâs more than seven minute duration, each time pulling you up short. You begin to wonder what exactly is this song? Which part is the main event, and which the complement? Either by itself would be wholly digestible and suitable for dropping into a category, but together, they make something disruptive, knotty and fascinating.
The Cakekitchen has been Graeme Jefferiesâ occasionally project since the 1980s, with records typically recorded simply, either alone or with a revolving cast of characters. For this one, the first since 2007âs Stories for Late at Night, Jefferies did everything himself. The mournful voice, the alternating delicate acoustic and defiant electric guitars, the bits of piano and trills of violin, the blocky explosions of percussion were all recorded during spare bits of time over numerous years on a portable 16 track in locations all over the world.
If you donât listen to closely to the words, the songs have a jaunty, manic air, an off-kilter whimsy that twists ever so slightly out of true. Zoom in on the lyrics, though, and darker, more corrosive themes emerge. âFall to Bitsâ with its fuzz-crusted guitar riff, its pendulous stop-start rhythm, its shimmery cymbal shushing chorus, sounds like day dream-y lofi pop, until you key into its venomous imagery. âI hate you now, you stupid cow, thatâs just how much it hurts, and when you go, Iâd like you to know, Iâm glad I burned your clothes,â sings Jefferies, enraged, apparently, in the calmest, most detached way possible. âTrains Are On Timeâ is antic and playful, with its stuttered bass line, its tipsy chorus, but you sense a prickling of agita in its jittery rush. What if the trains arenât on time?
âToo Little Too Lateâ eschews even the pretense of pop jollity. Of all the tracks, it sounds the most like This Kind of Punishment. Mournful piano, not chords, maybe octave intervals, punctuate the melody, which is ghostly, rueful and quiet. Even doubled, Jefferies voice is fragile, as he mouths midlife anxieties against the void (i.e., âYou thought that you could make a diff-rence/they told you it would work out great, but now itâs gone and everythingâs become oblong, too little too lateâ). There are lots of long pauses. When a drumbeat kicks in, it lends drive and density, but the cut is still somber and chilling. Â
Trouble Again in this Town is eccentric and unpredictable, shot through with sudden shifts of tempo and mood and rarely settling for the easy way of solving a sonic problem. It is always catching you off guard, jostling you out of comfort to force your attention. But while this is not an easy or reassuring set of music, it is well worth working through the cognitive dissonance it entails. Some things are worth paying attention to. Â
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AllMusic Staff Pick:
Cakekitchen
Time Flowing Backwards
1995
Indie Pop
It's hard to decide which record by this New Zealand group is their best. Most days, this is the clear winner as it perfectly balances fragile melodies, brain scraping noise and poignantly flat vocals in perfect fashion.
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