The Sea and Cake
The Sea and Cake – Car Alarm
From Car Alarm: Thrill Jockey Records [Buy]
The Sea and Cake‘s new album Car Alarm has recently arrived in the inbox, and it’s a cracker ! I’m not too familiar with this Chicago band’s previous work, but this material is really strong – recalling the best bits of mid-90s indie rock (Pavement, Sonic Youth’s pop side) mixed with a little bit of Tortoise-like experimentalism. The strong melodies sometimes echo that other Windy City band, Smashing Pumpkins. (But in a good, lacking-Billy-Corgan’s-whiny-voice sort of way).
It’s semi-intellectual stuff: vocalist/guitarist Sam Prekop has a PhD in music according to Wikipedia. And the band’s drummer is none other than the rather precocious John McEntire of Tortoise, dropping jazzy breakbeats into songs like Fuller Moon like it’s the most natural thing in the world. But the album never sounds like it’s shoe-gazing: all the tracks have strong pop hooks and super tunes. Yum yum yum.
Current favourite track is definitely Weekend – acoustic guitars dissolving into electro-breakbeat bliss. An example of how perfection is best wrought from simplicity and brevity. Here’s the video:
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[...] album on my first listen, and it’s become the soundtrack to my time in Birmingham. I wrote my early impressions on the blog a couple of months ago, and it’s still a joy to hear such intricate musicianship in a [...]