BRESSA CREETING CAKE | BAND
All too rarely does a musical group come along with all the right bits intact and just enough of the wrong bits there to make you sit up and really take notice.
Having already made serious wobbles in the airwaves over student radio with a string of demo recordings, Bressa Creeting Cake laid it out a couple of months back with the four songs making up their debut Flying Nun release, Papa People. Now stretching their prodigious talents into a full album's worth of tunes, this young band revel in the chance to show us exactly what they're capable of. And that, my friends, is a lot.
Right from the opening calypso swing of "Palm Singing", Bressa Creeting Cake kick into the playful pop inventiveness that stands as the album's major mood. The vast array of styles on the album include plenty of psychedelic tinges and a hint of progressive rock, but the band don't get stuck in any one place for long over fifteen songs. And those frivolous moments like Rocky Mountain (complete with that much-maligned staple of English 80s pop, the Simmons drumkit) are balanced out by more earnest tracks such as You & I; and They Write Words To People Who Are Dead.
Lyrically, both Ed Cake and Geoff Creeting string words together with no small amount of flair. Whether it be the Hungarian/ Mongolian hybrid language in Zenax, the imaginative leaps of syntax and imagery in Rocky Mountain and Egyptian Tanker, or the strange tales told in the likes of A Chip That Sells Millions or An Early Microscope, the use of words and meaning adds depth to the tunes here.
Bressa Creeting Cake was heralded as a young band "brimming with ideas". Their self-titled 1997 debut album - made up of 15 tracks swinging between psychedelic and progressive rock (including single 'Nervous Wreck') received acclaim, but then the trio went their separate ways. Geoff Maddock (then going by the stage name Geoff Creeting) and Joel Wilton, went on to form pop-folk band Goldenhorse alongside Kirsten Morelle. Ed Cake has released two solo albums and produced for various musicians.
