Cake on Cake, Hymns I Remember

review by dave heaton

Hymns I Remember seems an unlikely title for Cake on Cake’s third LP of delightful little dream songs, only because ‘hymns’ seems such a stately, proper word for these songs, which more often seem like sketches of memory.

On that level, I guess the title makes sense, for many of these are like a little snippet of one person’s past – a scene, an event, a place and time – albeit cast aglow through twinkly pianos and hand percussion, and Helena Sundin’s lovely/strange lullaby voice. There’s a postcard from Venice, a wake-up song to a girl who got dumped by a dumb blond guy who dresses like Conway Twitty, a remembrance of looking at an imaginative artwork on a calendar, a car ride spent listening to classical music and guessing composers. Many of these are messages of reassurance, or reassuring memories. The otherworldly music fits both that comforting feeling and the out-of-time snapshot feeling of the songs.

Scattered throughout the album are precise, concise love poems in song, like this one that ends the LP: “Lovely is the earth / lovely is my love / I know that I have so many / things to be so grateful about.” Those help make the album, like every Cake on Cake album, resemble a secret letter, one carrying wishes, hopes and dreams, wrapped up in song.

{www.sleepyrecords.com}