Click to listen to Cake's Showroom Of Compassion

Cake graduated from the same Nineties class of alt-rock oddballs that produced Beck and Weezer. But where their contemporaries evolved or died, they've stayed true to the same droll sound (and not unsuccessfully; Cake songs are weirdly ubiquitous in movie and TV comedies). Their sixth disc has the usual whirring keyboards and winking mariachi horns, all subject to John McCrea's satiric sing-talking. He lays into hipsters, guys with mustaches and Angelenos, tempering his derision with pathos. "I need a hideaway," he sings on the Seventies-rocking "Sick of You." It's a quirky, cloistered approach, and McCrea's sticking with it.

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“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.