I love listening to Cake when I drive. Their new CD (out this week) is decent, but it doesn’t have any of the cohesion of earlier albums. And it’s not supposed to; B-Sides and Rarities is an assortment of covers, instrumentals and leftover recordings. It plays like a dozen stand-alone tracks, setting the CD up to be cannibalized into iPods.

Track two (“Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”) is by far my favorite. I never thought I’d be looking up Kenny Rogers, but this cover’s got me humming a country song written more than a decade before I was born. That’s not easy, especially if you’re not Johnny Cash. “It wasn’t me that started that old crazy Asian war, but I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore.” Korea or Vietnam, I guess, but the soldier begging his love to stay true definitely resonates through to our modern patriotic chore.

“Mahna Mahna” is a cool track to own (who doesn’t love the Muppets?) but it doesn’t have enough staying power to hold its place at third in the track list. If it had been the last track, it would be an occasional sweet treat—but number three, I end up skipping it a lot.

Other Cake fans tell me that it’s all about “War Pigs.” Maybe if I knew Black Sabbath better. There are two “War Pigs” tracks and the bonus, sung with Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips, rocks right off the pop culture meter.

After listening to the CD a few times, I read that the casing was scratch n’ sniff. I don’t know. My copy smells vaguely sweet, but it’s no Like a Prayer cassette. I’ll go scratch it and hope for banana.