REVIEW: CAKE, Ben Folds, Tall Heights @ Blue Hills Bank Pavilion 08/13
By Zoe Salvucci
Monday night at the Blue Hills Bank Pavilion, alternative/funk-rock band CAKE kicked off their tour with Ben Folds, alternative singer-songwriter formerly of the Ben Folds Five, with Boston’s own Tall Heights as support. It was a relatively mellow show whose energy, both in the music and the audience, grew as the rain pounded down on the amphitheater’s roof.
Tall Heights played a short set of electro-folk tunes as the crowd ambled in to take their seats. The band was not afraid to bring the audience into the songs, something every act of the night would go on to do, and the as yet scattered crowd participated eagerly. Ben Folds led his set with two solo songs, himself on vocals and piano, before bringing the members from Tall Heights back onto the stage to help with the instrumentation of his more musically complex songs. (Tall Heights singers Tim Harrington and Paul Wright noted during their own set that learning Folds’s songs made them realize how simple their own were.) Folds had no trouble grabbing the audience’s attention with entertaining anecdotes leading into songs, and banter with the members of Tall Heights. He even composed a song dedicated to Boston for the start of the tour—during which a slip-up by Harrington caused Folds to insist they play the chorus again for good measure. Folds had fans on their feet as he approached the end of his set, playing more upbeat anthems than the songs rooted in piano and folk music.
The energy was left hanging in the air as excitement brewed for CAKE, who are touring despite having not yet released their upcoming seventh studio album. One single from the album has been released, via Soundcloud, titled “Sinking Ship,” but no further details have been specified. The only downside to CAKE’s set was its length—the band went on at 9:45 and were rushed offstage at 11:00, courtesy of Boston’s curfew on excessive noise, but cutting into that time was a 20-minute sidebar in which singer John McCrea gave away a tree, requiring the winner of said tree to have correctly guessed what type of tree it was. (It was an apple tree).
The band played well, though, in what time they had, opening with their older hit “Frank Sinatra” and closing the main set with their most mainstream hit, “The Distance.” As expected, their encore consisted of funk-rock masterpiece “Short Skirt/Long Jacket,” slightly sped up as they were crunched for time. McCrea’s voice has not lost any of its dryness or abundant sarcasm with time, even though the band has not put out a release (besides “Sinking Ship”) in seven years. Hopefully, this means the band is here to stay, despite concerns McCrea has expressed about the state of the music industry. Regardless, fans can expect at the least an album-length release in 2018.
