The Sea and Cake: Car Alarm

Whatever rust left in my ears by Everybody, The Sea and Cake’s last attempt at an album, is knocked away with the first drum jolt John McEntire sends through the speakers, a thunderbolt thrown by the resurgent Zeus of bands hailing from inside the Loop. Car Alarm does not take over from where Everybody leaves off; instead, we might as well go back in time, before the turn of the century, even, to the last time The Sea and Cake demonstrated – and celebrated – an edginess in their music. The Fawn or the eponymous debut album, and to a lesser extent, the more rock-inclined, yet smoothed-over Nassau: ten to fifteen years have passed since TSaC have opened an album with an abrupt energy, since the last time the band was not merely recording an album. The fine, yet effective, distortion and redacted, dirty drum production get us back to TSaC’s roots of confronting the listener, but doing so gently – bringing her onstage and connecting with the listener, forcing the listener to listen, not to hear.

Where Everybody failed is where Car Alarm seems to want to succeed. Prewitt and Prekop have always operated best when the deal with subtlety. Effortless marriages of upbeat, transparently-textured pop with austere, open-ended lyrics, and striking combinations of electronica or jazz mixed with slight variances in phrase lengths and unresolved dissonances in harmonies are what we come to expect from the four gentlemen from Chicago. Everybody veered, inconsistently, in one direction or another: too much rock in “Up on crutches,” not enough in “Coconut” or “Middlenight.” Too much Afro-tinged Talking Heads retread in “Too Strong,” and too much ‘70s game-show camp in “Introducing.” The only consistency was the lack of a solid, unified voice – the burnished production of One Bedroom, the Beach Boys meets Beck of Oui. There was a four-year hiatus between One Bedroom and Everybody, and it shows. Everybody was the working-out of numerous ideas in form and technique; the album saw John McEntire stepping away – perhaps reluctantly – from the production booth in favor of a lo-fi, slowcore veteran in Brian Paulson, which may have been Everybody’s undoing on at least one level. McEntire has the benefit of absolute familiarity with TSaC’s voice and had steered – if not dictated – the sound world of the band for fourteen years. Entrusting the band’s sound with a new set of ears, while theoretically admirable and necessary to gain some sort of aural perspective, is dangerous: it has been largely McEntire’s hand that has shaped production levels, production values, and the end-product. The changes are very clear: the hi-hat and Prewitt’s voice have a greater high-partial emphasis, Claridge’s nominally crisp bass playing becomes fatter where the emphasis is placed on tone rather than pitch – a typical lo-fi approach – and the rhythm section sounds less polished. Electronic effects and digital processing tend to well up high into the mix, recalling McEntire’s earliest, more experimental days with blatant production differences from song to song on The Biz. Luckily, McEntire returns to intimate territory, a benevolent sonic dictator, to work out his own kinks from a five-year production absence of a band that, for better or worse, bears his imprint, more than Prewitt’s floating falsetto, more so than Prewitt’s understated, occasionally complex harmonies.

Subtlety has always been a driving force in TSaC’s music, as much as economy of means and effective exploitation of effects in musical methods. “Aerial” starts the album with a high-energy shot, rivaling anything the band have ever produced, and puts to shame the anemic acoustic guitar opening of Everybody. The band claimed Everybody was a “straight-ahead rock album,” so, perhaps, by their own standards, Car Alarm is probably their version of Black Flag’s Damaged. The gated distortion on the evenly-paced eighth-note opening rhythm conjures to mind, at the very least, Sonic Youth at their poppiest – which is great – and at the most, their first few albums. The energy encapsulated in this two-measure riff propels the song forward, with a more-unified rhythm section than we have heard in at least seven years. Claridge’s light syncopations and McEntire’s agogic emphasis on the tom-toms during the first course of the song helps create the atmosphere of anticipation and forward momentum The Sea and Cake have been lacking since 2000. There is a palpable sense of urgency in the delivery of Prewitt’s lyrics – which may simply be McEntire’s return to the production booth -- but his voice, never strained or reaching, remains a mellifluous croon with ample upturns and downturns of pitch at cadences. As one associate put it, Prekop is Billy Corgan with some musical training.

“A Fuller Moon” reverts to older, more familiar material: a Zydeco-tinged, brush-beaten drum rhythm; light phasing and chorus on the rhythm guitars; a clear bass presence; and, Prekop decidedly in front of the mix. While engaging and up-tempo, this is still decidedly softer, poppy territory and a quiet acknowledgment of the successful mechanics of One Bedroom: well-laid instrumental layers and easy stratification, gentle rhythmic complexity that never dwarfs Prewitt’s spare guitar playing, and a tonal ambiguity hovering around the dominant scale degree, nevermind all the added tones and pre-dominant harmonies. McEntire’s deft production comes back with various treatments on each layer: changing the space of the lead guitar during the chorus, the slight reverberance and stereo-separation echo Prekop’s sentiment: “you decide just what you need / and still I want to know / … still I grow / just invincible” – all while the Bb tone held is finally brought forward as harmonically important, just as the next verse ensues adding in steel drums and lessening the apparent Bb drone.

“On A Letter” starts off, confusingly, like a well-produced Police song. “De Do Do Do De Da Da Da,” to be precise. The same flanging effect in the guitar, the same spare, tight drumwork and super-close snare miking, the similar high tessitura bass playing. It is not difficult to see TSaC’s influences or references in most cases, but this track juts out immediately because of it. The pentatonic scale usage throughout the chorus and reliance on added-sixth dominant chords continues the reference, but the savior here is McEntire’s performance: vacillating just enough between hi-hat and ride, the structure of the song is probably best demarcated by cymbal timbre than by harmony or verse. It helps, too, that McEntire places various elements of the drumkit in different stereo spaces, keeping the song interesting enough beyond initial reaction – or shock – about the song’s origins. This is probably one of the weakest songs on the album.

“CMS Sequence” is an odd little instrumental, all keyboard sequencing (as suggested by the title) that acts as little more than a palate cleanser, bringing to mind “BBC Radiophonic Workshop” from the Magnetic Fields’ Holiday: an aperitif, a petit-four, an hors-d’oeuvre. Something to distract the attention, and perhaps give McEntire more practice time with effects buses in ProTools or Logic. Or Cubase, even.

“Car Alarm” brings us back to the high-energy, layered yet spacious and translucent sound we – or I – have come to expect from TSaC. Trademarks abound here: driving rock drumming given McEntire’s signature subtlety in production; Prekop lazily, happily delivering lyrics in dotted rhythms against four-square, martial bass playing; plenty of major-seventh harmonies abounding; gentle figurations from the electric piano and guitar to complement and augment Prekop’s hazy meta-narrative lyrics:

still don’t know

why don’t you

I don’t do that

time refusing

it’s haunting me

rejection’s fine

river find dementia

to fall down so easily

The restrained energy, the sonic signature of band very delicately breaking free and reaffirming its voice, is most evident here in the title song. All of the imprinting and trademarks are here: an edginess that gets honed down ever so slightly by adding on each layer, a smooth lyrical delivery matched by constant rhythmic charge. Of all the clichés and images that come to mind, with this song being emblematic of their output – or of least this album, the idea of very fine-grained sandpaper comes to mind. Perceptibly innocuous; fragile, even. But, there is no going against or with the grain here – Johnny Rotten in a suit is still Johnny Rotten – and only just enough edge to take off the top layer of inhibition before it becomes ineffective. One of my main criticisms with many Sea and Cake songs is that they simply do not last long enough; here, however, I recant my critique, and the blaring of “Car Alarm” is just long enough: it gets our attention, shows us what it wants – and what it wants us to do – and as suddenly as it begins, it stops, a crash of silence from the street.

“Weekend” takes off into interesting directions, echoing the recent trend in the Indie world for juxtapositions of curious, or attempted-clever, electronic gadgetry and sequencing with acoustic guitar, dance-punk –or at least pushy and hi-hat-heavy danceable – drum beats and a bass line that belongs more to Lincoln Center or Tonhalle Zurich than the Black Cat or Orange Peel, regardless the probably synthetic origin of the bass. The stereo-conditioning of the acoustic guitar becomes a little cheap, but is finally met with electronic chordal treatments that meet and offset the constantly shifting stereo placement of the guitar – which may or may not have changed chords during the entire (brief) song. Where “Car Alarm” was just enough in duration and maximal impact, “Weekend” lacks entirely: it deserves much more development, much more articulation in production, and at least one significant harmonic change to add a little depth to the otherwise monochromatic theme. Brevity is wit? Perhaps. Brevity as a sad condition of a day off? Perhaps, as well. Prekop’s largely unintelligible delivery – without the aid of lyrics printed out – lends no semantic credence to the song as a symbol of the all-too-short respite from workaday life, and otherwise, little insight or inroads can be made.

One of The Sea and Cake’s primary downfalls is the treatment of their albums qua albums. After “Weekend,” Car Alarm goes precipitously downhill in terms of excitement, grandeur, and reinventing the TSaC sound through their earlier music. “Weekend,” in the bad old days of tapes, would be where I flipped the tape over, considered whether I wanted to listen to more of the album and skip Calculus, smoked a cigarette, and decided 3 absences in Dr Hulsey’s class was enough for the semester. After class, I would be sorely disappointed. TSaC treats practically all their albums in this manner: they frontload the album with the most listenable songs – generally the most polished, the most upbeat, the most hummable – and leave the diamonds in the rough for the B side. We can typically find one or two good tracks on the second half of each album, but it gets taxing to wait for the payoff that unanimously never comes. Each album tries to finish with a bang but falls short. Granted, not every world can end with a bang; this would be asking the ending of every classical music recording to have the Schwerkraft of Beethoven 9, or asking every Indie band to close their album with the melodramatic, ham-handed evanescence of “In the Backseat.” However, to have a string of albums that choose to unevenly distribute the wealth, as it were, and place higher expectations on the second half only to see those expectations unsatisfied, is alarming for a band as inveterate as TSaC. “New Schools” retreads the least tracks from One Bedroom and Everybody and in fact is a few chords away from being a replica of “Up on Crutches.” “Window Sills” rehashes any number of the smoothed-over attempts at garage from the past three albums. Is this the true voice of TSaC? Were we merely deceived by the first half of the album, thinking we were heading back in time? Is TSaC growing up and becoming adult contemporary, worst of all? Are we doomed to listening to yet another unimaginative fadeout?

While we have no evidence of the relent of the fadeout, we get, at least, in “Down in the City” a reprieve from airy-pop and a return to the electronica-infused B-sides of One Bedroom where production and density take on new heights. Reserved usage of steel drums and electronic treatments as synergetic elements helps keep the song afloat, with a digitally-manipulated drum track lending some degree of energy to Prekop’s small-ranged, defeated lyrics:

There’s no middle

no middle distance

it’s complicated

got it’s own mind

startin over

not getting even

just a whisper

Fortunately, the song ends with an orchestrated fade out, where instruments and layers back out one by one, rather than a generic motion of a signal fader. Still, this is not quite the crux the album stands to deliver based on its first half.

“Pages,” unfortunately, stops any momentum. While contemplative and as well-honed and articulated as any “slow song” by TSaC, the formula remains consistent: a straightforward form, harmonic variety confined to closely-related keys and arpeggiated backup guitar get punctuated with occasional three-against-two hemiolas and dotted-rhythm vocal delivery.

“The Staircase” starts out with a curious descending figure – most appropriately elements of a scale (from the Italian scala, meaning stair), and this figure is repeated a number of times in a vamp that does not really build with any sort of palpable tension. As is the case with most TSaC songs structured thus, the power is in the anticipation, and the surprise – though we see it heed its onslaught and are aware of the eventuality – is the entrance of the vocals, sustained keyboard drones, and (re)entrance of McEntire – both on drums and multitracker – to shape the song on both front and rear ends. Another brief song, the effectiveness is in McEntire’s proud drum announcement that, much like in “Parasol,” becomes rife with expectation until the 54 second mark and a headnod to Magazine, the Smiths, and the former selves of The Sea and Cake. Could this mark the first strong-ending album since The Fawn?

Heavily-processed steel drum samples and a tenderly vacillating keyboard figure ease in under the radar as “Mirrors” begins. As quickly as it begins, it ends, perhaps recalling “CMS Sequencer,” or, recalling the introspective codas found on albums ranging from The The to The Cocteau Twins or Wire or David Bowie’s Low, “Mirrors” is more of a muscle-relaxer than an album ender, but given the energy of the preceding song, there is some sense in its placement. It does, however, still lend an air of expectancy to it, and the placement on the album – not mirroring the structure of the other instrumental track – is perhaps suspect. The album neither ends with a bang or a whimper: it merely ends, and it ends too soon.

The Sea and Cake recorded this album rather quickly – a “three month gestation,” according to one rife-with-superlatives review. While the album certainly stands on its own against Everybody, the quickness of writing and recording shows: by and large, locking in to stock formulas with few departures is the prescription for a rusty ensemble. As soon as their Australian tour wrapped up in March, 2008, the band hit the studio instead of the showers. Still fresh and “limbered up,” as Prekop puts it, The Sea and Cake have no trouble working out this album in record time, having cleared away all the rust in their joints on tour. Still, it never hurts to take a timeout and observe the situation – and innovate a little – before the team gets back on the court. Nothing is worse then a conservative defense, and the only offense here is the predictability. The standouts are all on the “first side” of the album; there are inconsistencies among songs that hearken back to earlier successes and failures; economy of means and material does not necessarily mean economy of time; the ending and structure of the album as a whole is a little one-dimensional and disappointing. The bright spots, of course, are in what TSaC does well: subtlety; grace; dignified grunge; stern, thorough production and leadership. Prekop’s lyrics maintain the same nobly nebulous contexts and subtexts, and Prewitt’s guitar work is tempered and articulate, yet reserved. Claridge – through McEntire’s return to the booth – is spot-on with providing consistent rhythmic leadership to the group. McEntire’s adequate, subtle drumming and apt production return TSaC to its roots as a five-member, four-person band. This is not an album to fawn over or to worship. It is, at least, an album for everybody interested in the band, as it returns The Sea and Cake back to their crisp-autumn-nights on Lakeshore Drive origins and stomping grounds.