The Sea and Cake – Everybody

Chicago band pens top-notch songs to match its always-impressive sonics

Indie-rock supergroup The Sea and Cake is always easy on the ears. Their tasteful jazz-tinged rock—with its touches of samba and West African pop and Sam Prekop’s impossibly airy voice ?oating on top—always sounds nice at the very least. But with their previous records, Oui and One Bedroom, “nice” is pretty much as far as they got; both were rhythmically sharp and impeccably played, but the tunes seemed to hover squarely in the band’s comfort zone, making listeners wonder if Prekop might be saving his best stuff for his more impressive solo records. The pleasant-but-dull trend is happily reversed on Everybody, which deviates little in style but finds the songwriting drastically improved. Slick neo-disco vocal hooks (“Crossing Line”), bubbly progressions inspired by the golden age of singer/songwriters (“Coconut” isn’t a Harry Nilsson cover, but he would’ve dug it) and typically nimble instrumental interplay (“Exact to Me”) add up to the band’s best collection in a decade.