• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

The rock band Cake, a group that has been putting out albums for over a decade, comes to Royce Ha

Lo-fi. Alternative. Rock combo. No matter what they’re dubbed, Cake will deliver the freewheeling, organic sound they’re known for from the Royce Hall stage May 4.

With openers Robbers on High Street (New York) and Gomez (U.K.), this performance is part of the Virgin College Mega Tour, the second annual spring tour launched across American universities by the Virgin Mega Store.

Cake has been on tour for the past nine months to promote their album released in October 2004, “Pressure Chief.” As the 10-year mark of their existence as a band, “Pressure Chief” locks the group together, retaining the quirky sardonicism of their music, as well as the dry wit inescapable in front-man John McCrea’s sharp tongue and speak-singing vocals.

“We’ve been sounding pretty tight, musically,” said Vince DiFiore, Cake trumpeter. “We haven’t tried to change things at all. We haven’t departed from that ensemble sound because it’s part of the system that works. We have a good song at the middle of everything and then arrangements around that song.”

With “Pressure Chief,” the members of Cake took the recording process into their own hands. They transformed a two-bedroom house into their personal recording studio, engineering their work in addition to keeping their long-term status as producers.

“If anything has changed about our set-up, we’ve learned how to work together better in the studio,” DiFiore said. “It kept everybody busy, kept all of our minds active. It made the music even more vibrant because of all the focus we had to have on the project.”

The new record also integrates the band’s members more tightly than before.

“I’ve always done harmony vocals, but on this record, we have the whole band doing background vocals more than ever,” DiFiore said. “We also first brought keyboards and synthesizers into the band when ‘The Distance’ was recorded and realized after that, we could really pull out all the songs on keyboards. I’ve got my hands free, and since you can’t have the trumpet all the way through every song, I’ve got the bass to play the keyboard part live.”

Touring and promoting across the United States for almost a year, Cake has had its fair share of roadside drama.

“It’s been raining a lot on this tour, raining like crazy,” DiFiore said.

“We ended up doing some numbers acoustically for the audience while the crew figured things out with the PA system. We’ve also been traveling by tour bus for awhile, and there are certain codes of conduct with the tour bus that everyone learns to live by. We’re pretty disciplined about doing the right thing and respecting others on the road.”

Touring issues aside, every band faces the scrutiny cast by critics and music fans.

In the middle of the ever-evolving music scene, Cake is known for being plugged into, and promptly lifted off, genre labels. The aesthetic of the “rock hard” mantra, however, is something the band casts away, according to DiFiore.

“Rocking too hard and losing our balance would not be good for our music,” DiFiore said. “We don’t rock out for just rocking out’s sake – we come up with a good arrangement and put energy behind it. But if anyone ever compared us to Hank Williams Sr. or AC/DC, we wouldn’t be offended by that.”

As DiFiore explaines, the band tries to edge away from any affiliation with the indie-rock scene as well.

“We’re not a part of any movement. That’s just a lazy way to think of things. People are always looking for categories because that’s sort of the mental process of analyzing the music scene. Aside from the music, there’s a lot of critique and a lot of audiophiles out there trying to make sense of everything. We’re just trying to do our own thing,” he said.

In its Royce Hall performance, Cake plans to draw selections from all five of its albums to keep the set list fresh while acknowledging the loyalty fans have toward their earlier work. They will try to incorporate the audience into the show by asking the crowd to participate in several songs.

“We hope a lot of people sing along,” said DiFiore. “It’s inspiring for the band and fun for the audience. The theater sounds great when people take part in the sing-along parts in the song.”