By: Stephanie Robinson
When is the last time you thought about Cake? The band, not the confection. If your answer is anything other than today YOU ARE WRONG.
Cake played Friday night at Moody Amphitheater, unaccompanied by any opening acts. It was simply an evening with Cake. And it was glorious.
There was a recorded message prior to the show that no photo or video was allowed, but I did see multiple people breaking that rule. However, I was too chicken to do so, so I didn’t take any photos until literally the very end of the very last song.
The show was a delight from start to finish. They played two sets broken up by an intermission of 20-30 minutes (I didn’t time it tbh) with a good spread of tunes throughout their catalog, including three cover songs.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been to a show with so much crowd participation. And I don’t just mean between band and fans during songs. Weirdly enough, after returning from intermission, singer James McCrea gave away a lacey oak tree. Yes, a tree. Perhaps unfairly, the winner of the tree (who correctly identified the species) was an arborist – also named James.
By far my favourite part of this show was the vibraslap, an instrument that I was today years old when I learned about. I somehow never, in all these years, considered that the unique sound present in many Cake songs was an actual percussion instrument and not a trick of production.
On that note, multi-instrumentalist and founding member Vince DiFiore is a legend. He constantly switched between trumpet, keys, melodica, güiro, and maracas.
Aside from original members James and Vince, Cake is also composed of Xan McCurdy who’s been in the band since 1997, bassist Daniel McCallum who joined in 2016, and drummer Todd Roper who was a member from 1994-2001 and again since 2016.
If given the chance, I highly recommend getting out to see Cake. They sound incredible, put on a great show, and hey, you might even get a tree out of it!
