(2020) The Cakekitchen - Trouble Again in This Town


Review:
“Just to Be Your Superhero” 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 (“Felt so sad couldn’t get out of bed at all, oh poor pitiful me”). Then suddenly — but if you know any of Jefferies music not unexpectedly — the song makes a shift into a louder, denser, more dissonant and triumphant chorus, all of the sudden electric and rock, as Jefferies declaims, “I walked LA to Amsterdam/I fly Munich to Rome/I swim Oslo to Birmingham/just to be your superhero.” The shift from sad bunny indie pop to swaggering rock happens several times during the song’s 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 Jefferies’ 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 2007’s 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 don’t 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. “Fall to Bits” 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. “I hate you now, you stupid cow, that’s just how much it hurts, and when you go, I’d like you to know, I’m glad I burned your clothes,” sings Jefferies, enraged, apparently, in the calmest, most detached way possible. “Trains Are On Time” 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 aren’t on time? “Too Little Too Late” 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., “You thought that you could make a diff-rence/they told you it would work out great, but now it’s gone and everything’s become oblong, too little too late”). There are lots of long pauses. When a drumbeat kicks in, it lends drive and density, but the cut is still somber and chilling. 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.





Tracklist:
01 - Fall to Bits
02 - Trouble Again in this Town
03 - Just to Be Your Superhero
04 - Too Little Too Late
05 - The Trains Are on Time
06 - My Insatiable Polyfiller
07 - White Line Fever
08 - A Pig in the Sink


Media Report:
Genre: indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits