Cascadia Calling, 2025.07.07

"summer's gone, carry on, I'm a ghost in the dawn"

I'm in Spokane for the long holiday weekend. It feels like there's something sinister in the air. For an entire day, it felt like there was going to be a storm. There were brooding clouds and wind. We opened the windows and the sliding back door that looks out toward the river. We spent the day expecting rain that never arrived.

That's not all that's sinister, of course. 70 dead in Texas from flash flooding, including two dozen kids gone from a summer camp that washed away. A "1-in-500 year" event. I don't know how they even update those odds these days. The Spokane fireworks were interrupted by reports of a mass shooter. When they figured out it was a false alarm, they just went back to the fireworks. Started the show right back up as if nothing happened. The next morning, we learned that someone drove a car through the front of our favorite Italian place in Seattle.

And then, of course, there's the gutting of civic society so that our taxes can go to building concentration camps. I have a picture on my wall, given to me years ago by a dear friend. It's a photograph of graffiti reading "Without Music Life Would Not Be Fair".

I wish I was still young enough to believe that music evened the score. We soldier on regardless.

I've been wanting a change in the weather. I get bored of seasons easily. Summer has already overstayed its welcome. At least Spokane's better equipped for it than London or Seattle. Spokane looks good baking under the heat. Its broad, leafy boulevards and stately brick buildings look handsome in the summer. The parks and rivers seem designed to provide a little relief from the desert climate.

Still, what I wouldn’t give for a dreary day. Some rain, maybe a little slush piled up outside. A day that demands staying in.

The Lawrence Arms are one of my personal one-hit wonder bands. Which is to say, I absolutely love this track and know almost none of the rest of their discography. I don’t think they’ve ever had a single chart, as far as I can tell, which I suppose makes them a “no hit wonder”. But I keep coming back to this track off of their Buttsweat and Tears EP. Not only does “The Slowest Drink at the Saddest Bar on the Snowiest Day in the Greatest City” describe itself exactly, it has one of the greatest pop-punk choruses in history.

Of course, this is case of my mortal weakness for slice-of-life world building. The detail of this particular wistful day hit hard. I’ve spent a lot of days (most happy, many not) hanging out alone in bars and this tune always makes me want to drink in that particular snowy bar somewhere in (I presume) Chicago. I have even, more than once, showered out of pure boredom, just to pass the time.

My Interpol era was pretty short-lived. It was compressed to just 2004’s Antics and 2007’s Our Love to Admire. I know with certainty that I’ve listened to all of their other albums, but none of them stuck with me and I don’t think I’ve listened to any of them more than twice. I saw Interpol play Sasquatch festival some year around that time. (The Internet informs me that it was likely 2007 when they were on the main stage just ahead of Beastie Boys). I was unimpressed with their live show.

Interpol have always gotten along on the strength of Paul Banks’ lyrics and the tone of Daniel Kessler’s guitar. (Their singing and playing are good respectively, but I think almost secondary to what folks are talking about when they say they like an Interpol track). This song in particular added the phrase “rest my chemistry” to my lexicon. Maybe that’s why it’s on my mind at the end of a long holiday weekend with a few too many nights of drinking under my belt.

And while I can’t promise to go back reevaluate the latter decade of Interpol’s career, I do still come back to Our Love to Admire pretty regularly. That tone and those lyrical turns seem quintessentially mid-aughts stylistic affectations. I don’t know that any band could turn out something so plodding and pensive today with the sheer confidence that clean, crisp guitar hooks and grad-school poetry cleverness could carry them through.

Cake, on the other hand, is a band that I think that many people wrote off too soon. I genuinely love their whole discography. Maybe it’s just my affection for horns in my rock music or an appreciation of a band that can stick to the bit, but I find a lot to love in all of Cake’s music.

“Long Time”, off of their last album, 2011’s Showroom of Compassion shows how little the stylistic hits of a Cake song have changed over their career. This is their last album thus far (they claim that they have a new studio album slated for release this fall, but they’ve been saying similar since pre-Covid) and if this track had appeared on their first it would have fit in perfectly. You’ve got the hooting and hollering back up singers who sound like they’re having a much better time than vocalist John McCrea with his nearly-deadpan delivery. There’s an extended trumpet solo. Hell, the vibraslap even makes an appearance.

What’s interesting is that this is such a peculiar recipe for an indie pop song and yet Cake exploited it ruthlessly and with no competition in the space for almost 20 years. Every Cake song sounds like every other Cake song and no song by any other band really sounds at all like a Cake tune.