The
Sea and Cake
Car
Alarm (Thrill Jockey Records)
The exciting sound of a well-oiled band. Car
Alarm is The Sea and Cake’s eighth full-length
record. It is
bracing, like the surge of wasabe on sweet sushi, like the
slap of cool water on a diving body, like the head-rush of
a rollercoaster just leaving summit. Bracing music is most
often encountered in concert. Only the heaviest hitters have
translated the live thrill into the recording studio. Think
of the great working bands, the Charles Mingus Quintet, the
John Coltrane Quartet, the Meters or the Minutemen. For them,
there was no gaping chasm between the studio and the road;
the studio was just another stop, a gig, a continuous part
of the flow of playing and working and creating together.
Car Alarm is the sound of a well-oiled band. Heavy
hitters. Listen to the intricate intertwining strings of Sam
Prekop and Archer Prewitt and you’ll hear the frontline
of a working unit that has moved seamlessly from
the stage to the studio and back. Historically, The Sea and
Cake stayed the course since forming in Chicago
in 1993, but over the last couple of years they have pulled
in even tighter, recording hot and fast on the heels of a
busy performance schedule without breaking for other projects.
The sense of trust and communication that is key to a working
band – particularly in the rhythm section, where drummer
John McEntire and bassist Eric Claridge create their intimate
alchemy – is cultivated over the long haul, by means
of an epoxy bond and preternatural antennae. Stop working
together, and those connections go dormant, hibernate; keep
on trucking, and they deepen and get sharper, allowing the
band to reach for new things, experiment freely, evolve and
develop and grow. The ground doesn’t have to be prepared;
the canvas is already primed, ready for the first brushstroke.
The aim with Car Alarm was to follow up quickly on
its precursor, the somewhat stripped down Everybody.
Prekop says the band wanted to make a record that felt like
they had never stopped playing, a continuously
limbered up ensemble that parlayed its last tour into new
material. They started working on it right after an
Australian tour in March, and finished it after a miraculous
three-month gestation. If the usual process in pop music is
to make a record and then breathe life into it on the road,
this flips that presumption on its head, starting with a vital,
pulsing set-list on disc; what heights they’ll take
the new songs to in concert only remains to be seen.
Where in the past, The Sea and Cake has disbursed between
records to allow each member their individual
pursuits – Prekop and Prewitt’s artwork and solo
projects, McEntire’s production at his SOMA Studio and
work with Tortoise, Claridge’s alternate identity as
a painter – in this case they didn’t disband,
but dove straight into Car Alarm. The quickness reflects
a personal urgency, too, given the imminent delivery of Prekop’s
firstborn. Thoughts of fatherhood may lend a kind of optimistic
air to the record. It has the breezy, open, crisp sound that
The Sea and Cake have spent 15 years crafting, but Car
Alarm also has a palpable edge. That’s the edge
of people who know each other well enough to push a bit harder,
who aren’t worried about ruffling each other’s
feathers or trying something different, difficult, intuitive,
trusting. Something bracing. Here ‘tis.
-- John Corbett
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