Let’s all go back to the year 2017. If only, eh? Was an all right time for me. Specifically for today’s post’s context, I had finished my last uni exam but was still living in the accommodation. A lot of free time was on my hands, a lot of fun time was had. In that period, I remembered that ‘Jacking the Ball’ by The Sea and Cake existed after initially a year or two prior through Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. It became my favourite song for a moment there. After playing it a multitude of times, it got me wondering whether the rest of the album the track was on sounded much like it. The album being the band’s ’94 debut. In a roundabout way it did. You can tell all of the tracks on there probably originated from jamming sessions between the members with the lyrics probably coming as an afterthought. But then there also weren’t a lot of songs on the LP that were as immediate in the ‘poppy’ kind of way like ‘Jacking the Ball’ was.

The big exception though was, the album’s eighth song, ‘Showboat Angel’. For a lack of a better word, the whole track is certainly a vibe. Images that come to my head when listening to it usually centre around a cozy barbecue in the backyard with friends on a sunny afternoon, with this song playing on a stereo in the background. It’s a very specific thing when it comes to me. But I hear those guitars and that light keyboard on the left, and that situation is all I can think of. Thos guitars come in, singer Sam Prekop vocally riffs over the top for a moment which falls into the “Ooh, yeah, aw” chorus which, simple as it may be, hits a very sweet spot. There are times throughout where it sounds like Prekop isn’t even singing proper words, but in the parts where he is it seems to me that this ‘showboat angel’ character is most likely a girlfriend or something who generally makes the narrator’s life better amidst the unhappiness that lingers on both the east side and the west side. A good-time song for good-time moments.

I was intrigued enough by the album that when I was going through a phase of listening to full discographies by various people, The Sea and Cake were a band that I thought would be an interesting one to go through. I can’t remember which one I made it to. But I’m quite sure that I didn’t fall quite heavily for the albums that followed compared to the first one. I seem to remember the tracks on the other albums being less riff/jam driven, putting more focus on the vocal melodies that Prekop was delivering. And I don’t know, I just didn’t fall for them as much. But then again, that was quite a few years back. Maybe if I were to listen with these older, kind of wiser ears, things could be likely to change. Though that’s something for me to figure out. Anyone reading who hasn’t heard of the band, I’d say give them a go. They’ve got quite a few albums to their name, it could just be worth the time.