Cake came to the Palace Theater in Albany, and the Dudes were there. Here's a concert review done for the Albany Student Press:
"Cake with political icing"
by Leon Ferri
Cake lead singer John McCrea at the Palace Theater last week. (Photo by Patrick Dodson)The lights went dark and a disco light spanned the thunderous audience at Palace Theater as CAKE took to the stage last Tuesday. "We are building a religion," sang John McCrea, lead singer and founder of CAKE, an alternative rock band best known for their 2001 hit "Short Skirt Long Jacket".
Toeing the line of being a one-hit wonder, CAKE didn't parade around the stage boasting their hits, but rather played a balanced mixture of hits, lesser-knowns, and even an unreleased song.
The layout of the stage was noticeably simple: the five band members were all about five meters from one another, and apart from McCrea's light blue windbreaker and fedora, the other band members were normally dressed. A large reprographic halftone picture of the Swiss Alps served as an understated backdrop for a similarly composed band.
Indeed, CAKE started out slow, with the first two songs rousing only the most diehard fans in the audience. But by the third song, "Guitar", it had become clear that the party had started.
Sadly, the Palace Theatre's lack of standing room did not cater to the domineering thought which claimed the crowd by this time, which was to dance to the band's infectious, metronome-precision rhythm. Concertgoers compensated for this limitation by first dancing in front of their seats, then populating the aisles of the venue. No crowd surfing or destruction occurred, but the desire to dance soon overcame the staff, and by the end of the first encore performance (which included two of their more well-known hits "Short Skirt Long Jacket" and "The Distance") most of the crowd was supplying CAKE with a standing ovation which lasted strong through the second encore.
But this CAKE came with a political icing, and McCrea took the opportunity of down-time between songs to make an offbeat metaphor for the war in Iraq. He challenged the bottom seats and the balcony audience in a chant competition, and explained "we can't just march up there and kill everyone, because some people are nice... some people are singing. You can't bomb a whole country, because there are nice people there." Anybody logging onto the CAKE website and checking their "news" wouldn't find many band updates, but rather their personal political opinions mirrored in their posts about ExxonMobil, Sarah Palin, television, and drinking water. One lucky fan, Patrick Dolan, a junior Political Science major at Stony Brook, won a tree when he was able to answer that only a third of the world's population has drinking water readily available in their homes. However, Dolan was not deterred by the political tone of the concert and said it was the best of the three other CAKE concerts he's seen.
All in all, CAKE delivered a powerful concert, employing all their trademark instruments such as trumpet, vibra-slap, and washboard. A diverse crowd of young and old came together for one common enjoyment -- CAKE's rollicking, timeless jams. Despite the political overtones present between selections, the concert boasted a feature missing too often from this age of too-cool musicianship: it was a fun time.
More stories from the Albany Student press can be found at albanystudentpress.org
