Time for a break from the march through the alphabet, and we'll pick up a couple of recent purchases, the odd various artists and whatever takes my fancy from the upstairs drawers.
Picked up last week in a charity shop for a couple of quid, this is the first Cake album I heard, mentioned when Prolonging The Magic was reviewed.
Opening with Frank Sinatra, and John McCrea's telephone vocals, it doesn't get started until Vincent Di Fiore's trumpet and the rest of the band kick in on this fine song, then the hit single The Distance, almost spoken word with a fantastic guitar and trumpet backing. Then there are a couple of slower, pleasant songs, catchy without blowing this listener away, until a killer version of I Will Survive (yes, that one) with some ace trumpet work takes us to an almost perfect pop song in Stickshifts And Safetybelts. The second cover is Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps, well performed, leading into It's Coming Down, a listenable enough song, and the rap-type delivery in Nugget, whose chorus of STFU probably put the Parental Advisory sticker on the cover (as well as 'changing the fucking lock' in I Will Survive!)
She'll Come Back To Me has a country feel, with lots of steel guitar, and is nice, then a song I love and my wife hates - Italian Leather Sofa ("she's got a red dress and healthy breasts that bounce on his Italian leather sofa") Again, it's enhanced by that fantastic trumpet work! Drawing the album to a close, the final cover version, Willie Nelson's Sad Songs And Waltzes, a gentle country finish after the excitement of the previous track.
This really is the point of this exercise - to help me re-discover albums I've not heard for years and be reminded how much I enjoyed them.
4* - not a bad song on the album, and a few great ones.
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