My Friend The Chocolate Cake

'Stopping All Stations' Tour

Skyhooks... Cold Chisel... Midnight Oil... Hunters & Collectors... Crowded House... Powderfinger... My Friend the Chocolate Cake... which of these hallowed bands is the odd one out?

The answer, of course, is My Friend the Chocolate Cake. As an intensely colourful and ruthlessly honest musical mirror to Australia's complex national character, the band with the strings, the piano, the big tunes and the plainly daft name is unique among its peers.

It's also the only one releasing a new album this year. FIASCO is the unmistakable sound of My Friend the Chocolate Cake turning 21.

Singer/songwriter and pianist David Bridie, never a man to gild the lily, reckons it's a "classic cake mix", with its distinctive pop-noir, its brooding urban angst and rich filmic gravitas shot with a lyrical elegance for which Bridie is lauded.

"Dissonant textures, soaring pop string and vocal lines, sublime rhythm section grooves, sad songs and melancholic atmospherics together with the piano are all parts of this band's sound," he says. "It's gelled here as well as it ever has."

The glorious strings of Helen Mountfort's cello and Hope Csutoros' violin are high in the curious collision of elements that have made MFCC a failsafe concert draw, triple ARIA winners and a vivid presence on countless film and TV soundtrack these last two decades.

Their six-album history is a multi-dimensional mural of modern Australia that illustrates its geography, its political mores and its predominantly suburban identity - all by the kind of stealth that makes the most haunting, exhilarating and enduring pop music.

On FIASCO, says David: "There's some relationship songs (both messy and dreamy); some stories and observations (some flippant, some serious, some Australian, some suburban); some landscape stuff... and a song called 25 Stations that uses the metaphor of a train stopping all stations (except East Richmond) as a metaphor for life."

Stopping All Stations is the name of the tour coming soon to a venue near you, on the most exhaustive outing of My Friend's the Chocolate Cake's long and distinguished career. Prepare for a head-on collision with the quiet achievers of Australian pop.

FIASCO is in stores now thru Shock

TICKET PRICES:
Adults $34
Concession $26