All My CDs, pt 14: Comfort Eagle

Comfort Eagle - Cake

Today is tomorrow, and tomorrow today
and yesterday is weaving in and out

When I was in high school, online flash animation was in its golden age. I can’t claim to have been at the cutting edge of any cultural movement, but I did enjoy watching flash cartoons, and Drew Mokris (a.k.a. drewmo) produced some of my favorites. One of them was a music video for the song Comfort Eagle by Cake. It wasn’t funny (except in the sense of being visually absurd, which is typical of many music videos), but it was very well-made, and I loved the music. Soon, I decided to buy the album.

My impression, both when I first got the album and while listening to it now, is that the title track exists on a plane far above the rest. The rest of the songs are entertaining and well-made. Comfort Eagle is a work of transcendant art. The one time I shared it with my father - a musician himself and a bit of a music snob - he made a similar observation, calling the song “the hit among the dance songs.” He saw in it a scathing satire of the music industry. I see in it similar commentaries about commercialism and pop culture in general, a world that cynically commoditizes spiritual experience.  Its sound is darker than the other songs, and incorporates a broader variety of instruments but stops just shy of being overwhelmingly overproduced. The lead singer’s peculiar style of singing - emotionless, almost mechanical - contrasts with the pseudo-spiritual lyrics and pseudo-new-age instrumentation to underscore the themes of unscrupulous power co-opting the soul for its own soulless purposes.  “We are building a religion. We are making a brand / We’re the only ones to turn to when your castles turn to sand.”

Please don’t conclude that Comfort Eagle is the only good song on the album. I also enjoyed Comissioning a Symphony in C, Shadow Stabbing, and the instrumental Arco Arena. I like how the lyrics, even at their most coherent, don’t stick to common or conventional subject matter. That said, if not for Comfort Eagle, I don’t think I’d have liked this album enough to buy it and keep it around for this long. In a way, that might be a good thing. It means that my music collection broadens even my already-diverse listening habits.

Next: Prolonging the Magic