Complexity is the frosting on this Cake

Indie rock was built on ambiguities, playing off a finely tuned sense of the absurd, but its interpretations are often based on cultural reference points. For their latest tour, Sacramento alt-rockers Cake channeled the corporate sloganeering of the 2004 election, hanging a big backdrop behind their stage set that reads: “A Safer World, A More Hopeful America.” Now touring in Europe, that didn’t really fly.

“There are translation problems. I think that would be taken as a really straight-ahead empire-building kind of thing, to put it up behind us here in Europe,” says John McCrea, the countrified philosopher who fronts the band, on the phone from a club in Hamburg, Germany. “They’re already really sensitive about U.S. expansionism and everything.”

Easy to read as a dark dig at America’s wartime stance and at the opaque sheen sprayed over this country’s electoral process, the phrase taken at face value was a thumb in the eye of the Europeans -- especially after the reelection of President Bush, who, according to several polls, is wildly unpopular there.

After 12 years and five albums, two of them platinum and one gold, the idea that one of their touring slogans might have some sardonic multiple meanings is part of Cake’s modus operandi.

But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely clear which meaning the band endorses. It endorses all of them. Voila, the maddening, elusive allure of Cake.

“I want a hopeful America as much as the next guy,” says McCrea. “But I’m wondering if corporatization of every facet of our culture is the way that we’re going to reach that safer, hopeful place. Seems to me that there are some diametrically opposed objectives that won’t just iron themselves out without a lot of effort. It’s a strange time to be an American.”

And, perhaps, a strange time to be playing Cake’s brand of rock, part self-referential attack on musical certainty and part earnest affirmation of everything rock has ever been. With the raw, confessional, emotional outpourings of emo and screamo drawing younger punk audiences to more literal meanings in song, or adult listeners clamoring for the epic sweep of bands like Coldplay, the smaller, abstract assertions of “No Phone,” the first single from Cake’s album “Pressure Chief,” seem an artistic luxury. The song is something of a throwback, a rumination on the lack of contemplative moments in life ruled by telephones: “No phone no phone I just want to be alone today.”

Such an approach first brought the band success, scoring a huge hit with the oblique 1996 single “The Distance,” built on the neurotic image of a man pressing a car for speed in a race long over. The album, “Fashion Nugget,” went platinum with its unusual but effective mix of low-fi guitar, funky rhythms, bleepy new wave synths and Vince di Fiori’s oddly evocative trumpet parts. The ambiguity of that hit single was unsettled further by more jokey elements on that album -- like the cover of Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem, “I Will Survive.”

Those elements remain today, as the new album features a space-age pop cover of Bread’s “The Guitar Man,” but McCrea has been thinking a lot about the band’s undeserved reputation as the kings of irony, blaming himself for “communicating inadequately.”

“We are very earnest and we are very sincere. It’s just that sometimes you have sincerity and humor sitting in the same room on the couch together, drinking a beer,” he says. “Those two things can exist side by side without necessarily intermingling and becoming irony.

“I was listening to the third album, ‘Never There.’ And nothing really fit into that category. It wasn’t a joke,” McCrea adds. “Everything on the album was actually fairly earnest. In life, you have a happy moment and then there’s a sad moment just about to happen. To me, it’s more about realism than it is about irony.”

To preserve the fine points of this worldview, Cake made a conscious decision to get smaller in their production and sound, recording the new album in a home studio in Sacramento. Calling it a radical assertion of “musical downsizing,” McCrea feels this is more subversive than turning it up to 11.

The result is a collection of songs heavy on the cerebral but loose college rock for which the band is known -- most notably on the closer, “Tougher Than It Is,” a light funk vamp about accepting life instead of trying to force it into unworkable categories.

Cake is now working in a weird, post-post-punk era in which the jokes have slipped out of context and the earnestness is misunderstood. Like that banner. McCrea has been obsessing on questions of identity recently, and how those bowling-shirted indie-rock types who once understood their band so well may be changing, leaving the music free to simply be music.

“It’s a sort of insecurity that wants to use music as a badge, and wants it to be pristinely one thing or another,” McCrea says. “The cultural statement is more important than the musical statement. I look at what people want from me; they want me to be the wiseguy, or whatever. Maybe so they don’t have to. Maybe I need to stop doing that so that they can do it on their own, or something.”

Dean Kuipers can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Cake

Who: Cake, with the Walkmen and Heiruspecs

Where: Universal Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City

When: 8:15 tonight

Price: $32