Unique Cake, Off the Menu

Cake is a luxury item. That’s the conclusion of John McCrea, who sees his band’s blend of sharp irony, romance and spare, playful melody as hopelessly out of place. But Cake, which headlines the Mayan Theatre on Sunday, has learned to cope, turning out an unlikely stream of pop hits, beginning with 1996’s “The Distance,” that are like nothing else on rock radio.

“They use us as a palate cleanser between the real music,” says McCrea, whose frequently detached vocals mingle with the band’s lean guitar riffs and perky trumpet squeaks. “They put us in there to give people a break, and then back to the real emotionally intense white-guy music.”

The band’s new “Comfort Eagle” album offers more of the same, featuring lyrics that establish McCrea as both wry social critic and a romantic. On the title track, a Middle Eastern melody is set against metal guitars as McCrea coolly recites: “His hat is on backwards, he can show you his tattoos/He’s in the music business, he is calling you dude !”

The results are both humorous and strangely compelling, as on the current radio hit “Short Skirt/Long Jacket,” which offers competing images of love and commerce. But this is no joke band, even if one reviewer has compared Cake’s use of trumpet and other sonic eccentricities as the musical equivalent of a rubber chicken.

“For us it’s not a joke,” says McCrea. “It never was, despite the fact that we had a trumpet, or that our lyrics were not these straining, yarling lumberjack lyrics. We are probably more hate-filled than the bands that tout their frustration.”

Cake emerged from Sacramento in the early ‘90s, tapping into a postmodern consciousness while embracing musical accents sometimes reminiscent of light, mid-’60s pop music, owing much to the trumpet of founding member Vince DiFiore.

“Our music sounds dated from the very first time you listen to it,” McCrea jokes now.

The source behind the cadence of McCrea’s aloof vocals was more musical than literary, though he was impressed as a teenager by author Frank O’Hara. “I don’t like hearing songwriters talk about their literary influences,” he says. “I remember reading some songwriter say he was influenced by Henry Miller and I just about vomited.”

He’s equally uninterested in spoken-word performances, though his own lyrics share an interest in complex wordplay. “I think I was exposed to it accidentally as a child,” he says. “My parents had black turtlenecks and were into Woody Guthrie and hanging out in San Francisco.”

McCrea says he draws more meaningful inspiration from the spare emotions of Hank Williams or the raw, punk-fueled rock of the Violent Femmes.

Cake albums also suggest that the band is unafraid of empty sonic spaces, not unlike the flavor of early Talking Heads.

“They were economical sounding,” McCrea says of those albums. “And we try to make our records as economical sounding as possible. It seems like all that stuff that people add to their records tends to be fleetingly appropriate. It makes things sound dated really quickly.”

Cake aims for a quirky timelessness. Two songs on the new album, “Shadow Stabbing” and “Meanwhile, Rick James ... ,” date back 10 years, which suggests that McCrea was already on to something as a young songwriter.

And Cake albums are pointedly self-produced by the band, in search of a clean, uncluttered sound.

“You’ll hear our music between the Creed song and the Staind song, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me aesthetically,” he says. “But I’m glad if our music is useful.”

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Cake, Sunday at the Mayan Theatre, 1038 S. Hill St., L.A., $25, (213) 746-4674.