Nimble Fingers That Dance on Numbers

Or, the better side of mid 90s retro.

Do you like the capitol of the great state of California? I sure as heck do. It’s 10% Northern Cali hippydom, 30% really rich fuck, 30% tech bros 15% desert antisocial and 15% methamphetamine. Does that add up to 100%. Perhaps it does. I’m an engineer….I’m not good at math.

Anyhoo, I think I should throw in some local boys here, so speaking of Sacramento......

219 of 365,

In which we find a group of Northern California boys getting together to make amazing, stripped down music.
This is the second album by Cake; it was my intro to them, and it's also my favorite by them.
This record is amazing. John McCrea's voice and manner is fantastic...His deadpan storytelling blows me away. But it is the guitar playing of Greg Brown that seals the deal. It is the signature sound of this band, and after he left, they were really never the same. But on this album, where they thankfully left a ton of aural room in the songs for it, the guitar soars. It's like an angry Gretsch bird that swoops in and pecks at your left eyeball. In a fucking good way, I might add.
There is a cover of Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive" on here. And while it has a completely different tone in McCrea's somewhat deadpan voice (and it made oh, so much sense to me back when I was 28 or so), it's Brown's guitar that makes it. It is the best one note guitar solo ever written. He puts so much attitude in that one note, that if that were all he would ever play, he could walk away and just say, "DONE." It is that good.
I first heard this album while going thru heartbreak things, so it holds a special place. Check it out.

Fun fact, the name Cake does not refer to the delicious desert that may await you after a meal or after a horrible torturous maze imposed upon you by a crazy AI, but it refers to what a substance does when it sticks to something and does not come off. Like something on a shoe.

Cake. Fashion Nugget.
Capricorn Records, 1996