Graham Reid | | 4 min read
Bad Bodied Girl
In a recent correspondence about the vinyl reissue of an early Cakekitchen album, the Kitchen's head-chef Graeme Jefferies said, “my profile in New Zealand is very buried”.
Which confirms the adage of the late Ken Nordine: “We all see the world from our own disadvantage point”.
We don't mean Jefferies -- he's no doubt right – but Elsewhere's disadvantage point. Round our way he's something of a household name since his early bands Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment with his brother Peter.
Perhaps people lost touch with him after his 1988 debut solo album Messages For the Cakekitchen on Flying Nun (after which he adopted The Cakekitchen moniker, a band with a revolving door of members) and the fact he spent so many years living, playing and recording in Europe after 1990.
The musically ambitious boy from Stratford was signed to the very credible New York indie label Homestead (Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Swans etc).
It would be a fairly brief association (three Homestead albums but decent showings on the US touring circuit and beyond) but Jefferies was an established name in the indie-rock world – he subsequently signed to the equally important Merge – and over the decades the Cakekitchen continued to record and tour out of Jefferies' home-bases in France then Germany.
It will doubtless come as a surprise to many – as it did to Elsewhere – that the Cakekitchen has released 16 albums (yes that is “sixteen”!) and many have been reissued in recent years.
Back in Wellington, Jefferies has been taking control of that vast catalogue through reissues.
Elsewhere threw an approving spotlight on four CD reissues of albums recorded the 2000s – How Can You be So Blind?, Put Your Foot Inside the Door, Everything's Driving You Crazy and Stories for Late at Night – and also some of Jefferies/Cakekitchen more recent vinyl releases Calm Before the Storm (2012) and Trouble Again in This Town (2020).
As Jefferies noted about that release of those four CDs they “all did really well outside of New Zealand but were/are more or less unavailable in here”.
All of the Cakekitchen's albums are rewarding – Jefferies is a bridge between Sixties-influenced pop melodies and indie.rock fuzziness – but he is especially pleased by his most recent resurrection: the 1994, fourth album Stompin' Thru the Boneyard which was originally distributed by Raffmond and Rough Trade in Europe, and Merge in the US.
Stompin' Thru the Boneyard has now been released on vinyl by Ally Records and is quite the discovery.
Some of it recorded in a 13th century castle in Bretagne by Jefferies (guitar, piano, violin, vocals) and longtime collaborator, drummer/percussionist Jean Yves Douet, Stompin' – which Jefferies has remastered for reissue – scooped up very favourable notices everywhere from Boston's Phoenix to indie magazines.
Merge label boss Mac McCaughan (of Superchunk) described it as “effortlessly epic guitar and drum jams from deep-voiced New Zealand legend Graeme Jefferies. One of my favourite Cakekitchen iterations”.
And you can hear why Stompin' has deserved this reissue.
The opener Tell Me Why You Lie rides a naggingly enjoyable minimal and repeated guitar buzz as Jefferies' dark brown vocal flicks between the personal (“I'd rather be in Holland. On the day we met I knew I was headed for trouble”) and the strangely disturbing “(Eight floors above a man is shouting words that I can't understand and in his hand he holds a hammer”).
It kicks off the nine-song album with a sense of urgency which is picked up again in the huge fuzz-pop momentum of Bad Bodied Girl (“with all her problems she's looking for something to give her what she lacks”) which is not too distant from early Chills coupling with an energised Straitjacket Fits.
And again on the brittle hi-treble and noise of Mr Adrian's Lost in His Last Panic Attack which might be Bowie put through a damaged Cuisinart.
And Bowie seems to come through again on the pop gesture of the downbeat This Questionnaire? (“Who's going to save you? Who's going to save you from yourself?”)
But between these songs Jefferies alternates his quieter and more intimate moments: the seductively tremolo-quavering Even As We Sleep which allows his deep and somewhat uneasy vocal (“even as we sleep demons rest upon your pillow”) to sometimes collide with a backdrop of huge strums; Hole in My Shoe is psychedelic rock which arrives in multiple passages and shifts of direction (Anglo-folk acoustic in the central section with violin) in its eight-plus minutes which in the last half becomes a massive, abstract soundscape of guitar washes, distortion and piano.
The Mad Clarinet with longtime friend Alistair Galbraith on violins is a kind of metaphorical folk song where the disturbing sounds parallel the lyrics about a damaging relationship.
With pop-rock as smart and textured as the Buzzcocks, Bob Mould, Frank Black and Bowie, and the edginess and uncompromising ethos of underground rock, Jefferies has taken the Cakekitchen from St Petersburg where they amusingly mis-spelled the band's name ("I didn't have the heart to tell them, what did it matter anyway?" says Jefferies) and Moscow, to Amsterdam's famous Paradiso, New York's New Music Seminar and CBGBs (“enrapturing a crowd that's always convinced it's seen it all,” according to CMJ New Music Report), London's Borderline and beyond.
Graeme Jefferies is someone special even if his profile in New Zealand is very buried. The proof is on the albums . . . and Stompin' Thru the Boneyard is as good a place as any to find the evidence.
Think about it: 16 Cakekitchen albums?
Time to tune in, don't you think?
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The Cakekitchen's Stompin' Thru the Boneyard is available on translucent “Cake Icing Ghost Yellow” vinyl (with a download code and lyric sheet insert) from bandcamp here.
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Other Cakekitchen album at bandcamp are here
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Graeme Jefferies answered questions about his life and music for Elsewhere here.
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