Artist: Cage The Elephant
Label: Relentless Records
Release: 2011
Rating: 2.5/5
The new studio album from the alt-rock short-pants brigade Cage the Elephant has delivered a story that’s pretty much what you’d expect. Given how well their debut was received, the band decided to sail full speed into commercializing their sound. The word “alternative” is a weird thing in rock music these days. Misused more often than not. In the case of Cage The Elephant, all you can do is confirm for the thousand-and-first time that these are “wannabe” alt rockers with hollow prestige. They’re peddling their pretty hairdos and the stares of deeply wounded cocker spaniels whose master forgot their daily, well-earned dog biscuit, and that’s about it. The “alternative” in their case is simply wrapped up in the cosmetics of outward appearance, because this music isn’t relevant anymore. What rescues it in this “fake” way is nothing but the powder, courtesy of the “Bambi effect” gazes of little boys playing at being musicians.
That’s enough of an intro, just to save you time and “gorging”. You’re missing nothing if you decide not to read the rest of this review, or even try the band. With the new album, music for little girls has moved away from the garage-leaning blues punk rock blasting that clung to the “punk arrogance” of the debut, in a more polished direction. There are more pretty melodies that “rock” the listener into a nice dream, like Around My Heart, the opener Always Something (really the only genuinely good track in compositional terms), and the predictably pop-song-ish Right Before My Eyes and Aberdeen, which owe a lot to the fact that the band moved to Britain and soaked up the sounds of post-Britpop rockers like Kaiser Chiefs. In these moments the guitar sound is also tighter and more organic. It feels like instruments carved from fifties and sixties wood are back in use. Or at least it sounds that way, and that’s where the indie feel grows, not to say outright jangle pop. Shake Me Down is the example Cage The Elephant could have followed all the way when they chose to commercialize. It’s another moment on the album worth mentioning (released as the lead single), where the band successfully blends the friendliness of indie pop cosmetics with the raw expression carried over from the debut. The “lullaby whiner” in Rubber Ball is plain theft of minutes from everyone who decided to reach into their pocket and invest in this little record..
The album is a wobbly product. Both in quality and in the swings in energy between individual tracks. If the debut was more clearly defined style-wise, the second album brings more differences between songs. At the expense of the band’s commercialization. So outbursts of punk frenzy are much rarer on the new album. They get caught in moments of greater disjointedness and deliberate off-key sloppiness in the garage blasting of Indy Kidz, Sell Yourself, Sabertooth Tiger and Japanese Buffalo, which, to be honest, suit the feeling of authenticity much better and as such form a natural link between the debut and its successor (if we’re looking for a natural path of evolution for Cage The Elephant at all). Sabertooth Tiger and Japanese Buffalo are very similar. They’re even placed back to back, which proves the band stuffed the album with extra filler, since insight in the studio was in short supply this time. Flow, which closes the album, is indie rock’s innocent ambient “scratching,” built from two different parts (the second part is a repetition of Right Before My Eyes) with added “filtered” vocals sticking to deliberate producer distortion (echo), whose basic purpose is to lead the listener away from concentrating on the band’s instrumental work, which is empty and unoriginal. In it the band says everything in two minutes, yet the track is stretched out to more than seven. As long as you don’t look left and right, this kind of music will fulfill you. In other words, tripping on the uneducated musical masses. And plenty of bands pull that off today. Regardless of the album’s success, which sold 39,000 copies in the week after release on US soil and so reached number two on Billboard’s best-selling albums chart, the band’s future is clearly written.
The near-term forecast for Cage The Elephant? They’re coasting on expression with the new album, and that coasting will continue with the next albums, until “more influential media” start having them for lunch, which is just as ordered. The industry needs new faces, after all. For instant use and exploitation. Cage the Elephant are neither the first nor the last domino in this machinery either. Sadly. If you let the label build you entirely, it also has every right to tear you down.
Lineup
Matthew Shultz – vocals, piano
Brad Shultz – guitar, backing vocals
Lincoln Parish – guitar
Daniel Tichenor – bass guitar, backing vocals
Jared Champion – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Production
Jay Joyce
Tracklist
1. Always Something (3:41)
2. Aberdeen (3:12)
3. Indy Kidz (5:02)
4. Shake Me Down (3:31)
5. 2024 (3:10)
6. Sell Yourself (2:11)
7. Rubber Ball (3:47)
8. Right Before My Eyes (3:14)
9. Around My Head (3:11)
10. Sabertooth Tiger (2:51)
11. Japanese Buffalo (3:03)
12. Flow (7:43)
