Tuesday, 01 December 2009 23:50
![Cage The Elephant [ self-titled album ]](/images/reviews/music/december09/cagetheelephant.jpg) |
A few seconds into CAGE THE ELEPHANT’s debut and self-titled album, and you already know exactly where you stand. It opens like something by Arctic Monkeys or The Pigeon Detectives: you know, a distorted, three-chord guitar riff, a spindly solo over the top, a gradual increase in tension and speed, and then bam! And that’s not where the comparisons end: as with the Monkeys’ Alex Turner, Matt Shultz’s vocals are tripping and half-spoken, and thick with his accent. Cage The Elephant also opened for some of The Pigeon Detectives’ shows in early 2008. Beginning to see a connection here? |
The first track, ‘In One Ear’, follows in the dissatisfied vein of such greats as The Who’s ’My Generation’ (“Rock ‘n’ roll is dead/I probably should have stayed in school/another generation X/who somehow slipped up through the cracks”). It makes for an attention-grabbing opener and indeed, it has one of the catchiest hooks of the entire album, alongside the band’s first single, ‘Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked’. These two songs showcase Cage The Elephant at their best: as there’s not a huge amount of diversity over the course of the album, if you don’t like either track, you probably won’t like their other releases.
It will be interesting to see what direction they’ll choose to pursue in the future, because their present blend of fun, smart-mouthed, fast-paced blues-punk can only take them so far (indeed, I have to admit that I found it hard to distinguish between many of the tracks on ‘Cage The Elephant’, despite giving the album several listens). One can hope that it won’t be along the lines of ‘Lotus’, in which they bemoan the war in Iraq (“keep droppin’ bombs until the whole world’s dead”), as the hard-hitting subject matter of this one track seems to jar with the upbeat, cheeky vibe of the rest of the album.
As it is though, the eleven tracks of this album work well together: there are just enough of them to explore the range of their sound, without regurgitating ‘more of the same’. ‘Cage The Elephant’ sounds fresh and modern, despite belonging to a genre where it’s particularly hard to do so. Although the band might not be quite the saviours of modern music that their online profiles declare them to be (“Cage The Elephant are the mouthpiece for disillusioned, working-class America in 2008” – indeed), their debut is definitely worth a spin. My gut feeling, however, is that it will be their second album that determines their staying power, or lack thereof.