The idiosyncratic music of Cake – an alternative rock stew seasoned with funk, pop, jazz, rap and quirk -mingled with a fragrant pot haze for a mostly pleasant event last night at the Sunset Cove Amphitheater in West Boca. There was no
opening act, and Cake took the stage at 8:15 and played for two hours with an intermission: The result was not too short and not too long, and most concertgoers were able to make it home in time for Conan.
The tour ostensibly is meant to promote the band’s latest album “Showroom of Compassion,” released this past Tuesday, but you couldn’t tell it from the song selection. Very few of the songs came from “Showroom.” Performing without a set list, the group played an eclectic collection of hits (“Never There,” “Rock and Roll Lifestyle,” “The Distance”) and unexpected pleasures (“Stick Shifts and Safety Belts,” “Haze of Love,” “Mexico”), cutting a balanced swath across its six studio albums.
John McCrea, Cake’s deadpan lead singer, bore a grizzly beard and donned a tan fedora and blazer, resembling a cross between a mountain man and a private investigator from a ’40s film noir. He’s known to be a bit testy onstage, a predisposition that only showed up once or twice in the evening. He was big on crowd participation, using segmented portions of the audience to conduct a symphony of backing vocals on “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” and the recent single “Sick of You” (A tactic he shares with onetime collaborator Ben Folds). The show only dragged when McCrea quizzed the audience on the sad, single, pitiful-looking tree erected at the front of the stage (the tree looked like a withered refugee from a rejected Ansel Adams photograph). Most of the audience members McCrea called upon guessed the tree type wrong, which made a dull segment last longer than it should have.
The concert was my first at the unusually small amphitheater. Parking is steep, at $10, and drinks are amphitheater-average, at $7 a beer and $3 per water. Standing near stage-right during Cake’s first act, I found the fans surrounding me to be loud, obnoxious rabble-rousers. Situated at center and further back during Act Two presented no crowd problems, reaffirming that old mantra about real estate: location, location, location.
