The Sea and Cake: One Bedroom : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Like the best of the Sea and Cake's work, the sixth album from the Chicago indie outfit is a tempest of pastels: It's full of burbling electronic experimentation but still manages to always carry a tune. On the standout title track, telephone tones dial out a gentle melody beneath the organic patter of drummer John McEntire's rimshots and Eric Claridge's light Brazilian bass lines. The quirky keyboards on "Hotel Tell" sound delightfully futuristic in a late-twentieth-century kind of way. "Try Nothing," "Left Side Clouded" and opening track "Four Corners" are classic Sea and Cake songs: Frontman Sam Prekop's melancholy vocals and guitar-playing are barely more than a beautiful wisp over the rest of the band's ethereal sounds. One Bedroom's soft hue is interrupted only in the final track, a wonderful cover of David Bowie's "Sound and Vision" that's so overwhelmed with Eighties synth it could only be painted electric blue.

DAVID MALLEY
(RS 915 – February 6, 2003)