Cake On Cake
I Guess I Was Daydreaming
Desolation
Deceptively simple, Cake on Cake’s I Guess I Was Daydreaming should appeal to the same people who found El Perro Del Mar’s debut so rewarding. Mostly a one-woman show, Helena Sundin composed, arranged and performed nearly every note on this disc. What’s so great about Sundin’s music is how tenuously held together it feels. She pulls out all kinds of disparate instruments and mixes them together to get a dizzying array of warm sounds and textures. It’s kind of like a Fisher Price orchestra exploded all over the soundtrack to a Japanese children’s video game. On the fantastic “Sea Microphone” she layers keyboards, clacking percussion, digital beats and a tambourine softly over top of each other, while her multi-tracked voice nervously bounces back and forth. When she intones “Your love is not so far away as it feels today” on “Sparrow Parade” over a restrained piano line and chirpping percussion, it’s hard not to believe her. It’s the near complete realization of cuteness and charm, both of which are intensified even more when the lyrics come into the equation. “Come On Rainbow” is Sundlin repeating the title phrase, call-and-response for two minutes and the title track features the smile-inducing gem “I guess I was daydreaming/ Dreaming about days.” Even the songs of longing and melancholy like “Emmylou and You” and it’s chorus of “I love to miss you sometimes” are tinged with more than a little happiness. Pop music needs more writers like this who are less concerned with obeying the linear and conventional structures of pop songs. Is it any wonder this comes from Sweden?
Desolation Records: http://www.desolationrecords.com
