Released via Sony CMG, "Prolonging The Magic" is the excellent third studio album by American alternative rock band CAKE. It was originally released on 6th Oct, 1998.

A 13 song album, pressed on standard Black, 180gm LP Vinyl. 

CAKE’s adherence to their original guiding principles has only grown stronger. Originally formed as a somewhat antagonistic answer to grunge, CAKE’s democratic processes, defiant self-reliance, and lucid yet ever-inventive music has made them a nation-state unto themselves, with no obvious peers, belonging to no school. In addition to writing, arranging, producing, and performing their own music, they have taught themselves to engineer their recording projects in their solar-powered studio, which actually generates more power than is needed to run it, causing the building’s electrical meter to run in reverse.

TRACK LISTING

1. Frank Sinatra
2. The Distance
3. Friend Is A Four Letter Word
4. Open Book
5. Daria
6. Race Car Ya-Yas
7. I Will Survive
8. Stickshifts And Safetybelts
9. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps
10. It's Coming Down
11. Nugget
12. She'll Come Back To Me
13. Italian Leather Sofa
14. Sad Songs And Waltzes

All too rarely does a musical group come along with all the right bits intact and just enough of the wrong bits there to make you sit up and really take notice. Emerging on the Flying Nun label in the late 90s, Bressa Creeting Cake was heralded as a young band "brimming with ideas". Their self-titled 1997 debut album - made up of 15 tracks swinging between psychedelic and progressive rock (including single 'Nervous Wreck') received acclaim. Having already made serious wobbles in the airwaves over student radio with a string of demo recordings. Stretching their prodigious talents into a full album's worth of tunes, this young band revel in the chance to show us exactly what they're capable of. And that, my friends, is a lot. Right from the calypso swing of 'Palm Singing', Bressa Creeting Cake kick into the playful pop inventiveness that stands as the album's major mood.

The vast array of styles on the album include plenty of psychedelic tinges and a hint of progressive rock, but the band don't get stuck in any one place for long over fifteen songs. And those frivolous moments like 'Rocky Mountain' are balanced out by more earnest tracks such as 'You and I' and 'They Write Words To People Who Are Dead'. Lyrically, both Edmund Cake and Geoff Creeting string words together with no small amount of flair. Whether it be the Hungarian/Mongolian hybrid language in 'Zenax', the imaginative leaps of syntax and imagery in 'Rocky Mountain' and 'Egyptian Tanker', or the strange tales told in the likes of 'A Chip That Sells Millions' or 'An Early Microscope', the use of words and meaning adds depth to the tunes here. Geoff Maddock (then going by the stage name Geoff Creeting) and Joel Wilton, went on to form pop-folk band Goldenhorse alongside Kirsten Morelle. Ed Cake has released a solo album and produced Don McGlashan, Neil Finn and The Brunettes. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Palm Singing
2. Egyptian Tanker
3. You & I
4. Greasy Grandma
5. A Chip That Sells Millions
6. Zenax 7. Rocketship
8. Rotten Old Bitch
9. They Write Words To People Who Are Dead
10. Papa People
11. Rocky Mountain
12. An Early Microscope
13. Peyton Farquhar
14. Wood For Her
15. Beer Ginka
16. All The Cars
17. Gulfo Benga
18. Billy Two (Clean Cover)
19 Ring (Abba Cover)

Cut The With The Cake Knife was recorded by Rose McDowall in 1988/89 following the break up of her group Strawberry Switchblade. Produced with the aid of several musicians in several studios, the album features songs written for the fabled second Strawberry Switchblade album. More importantly perhaps it showcases the honest, direct and life-affirming songs of one of the greatest unsung songwriters of the modern pop era at a tumultuous time in her career.

Tibet opens the set and could be one of the best pop songs you’ve never heard. The innate sadness of the songs’ content – the loss of a friendship, impending sorrow – is heightened to heart-melting level by McDowall’s pop nous and melodic sensibility. Choruses and hooks are everywhere on Cake Knife, from the outsider take on stadium 80s pop in Wings Of Heaven to the spiraling, ecstatic So Vicious, a glorious anthem that highlights the human fragility in McDowall’s vocal performance, an instrument that has never lost the naïve purity it first exemplified in Strawberry Switchblade’s early 80s recordings. The centerpiece of the album, the title-track, is the greatest Switchblade pop chart hit that never was. Like the veiled melancholy of her former group’s hits, Cut With The Cake Knife hints at a darkness beneath the gloss, a darkness that saw McDowall delve into more esoteric territory with her subsequent recordings and collaborations. Cut With The Cake Knife serves as the bridge between the pop music McDowall had been making with her friends Jill Bryson, Lawrence from Felt and Primal Scream to what became a more extreme, deep sound informed by neo-folk and post industrial music.

Rose McDowall’s role in the canon has always been one of an outsider. Beginning in Glasgow’s East End in the avant proto-noise group The Poems, achieving fame briefly in the 80s and then disappearing into counter-cultural folklore, the emphasis in the internet-age has been skewed towards her image and cultural significance. Unseen to many, her solo work, her groups Sorrow and Spell and her collaborations with a whole host of underground luminaries have still touched lives. As McDowall elucidates: “They're real sad songs, about real life. I've had people come up to me to say I'd connected with them and helped them. I remember a gig in America when we made a whole room cry. It was bizarre. A couple at the front of the stage started crying and then these two boys beside and suddenly everyone was crying. And I thought, "that's power."

Night School’s issue of Cut With The Cake Knife includes unpublished photographs, extensive sleeve notes from Rose McDowall and 2 bonus tracks culled from the bootleg 7” “Don’t Fear The Reaper.” 

British band Circulus have almost single handedly reinvented English Psychedelic Folk Rock for the 21st Century. This, their long awaited third album, brings you more of the bands "Twisted Mushroom Pixie Rock". Circulus first made their mark on British music in 2005 with the release of "The Lick on the Tip of an Envelope yet to be Sent" which appeared in the top fifty albums of the year in Mojo, The Observer and NME. Circulus have heralded the recent 'acid folk' craze - alongside other protagonists of the genre such as Espers and Tunng - yet their sound is totally unique coming across like a mixture of medieval English Folk, Fairport Convention and Ozric Tentacles! This new album takes the band into melodic pop territory with some beautiful multi part harmonies alongside the usual bucolic mayhem!