Cage the Elephant Rage On
The eclectic Kentucky band takes on the dark side of rock on a potent album
The Kentucky band takes on the dark side of rock on a potent new album.
It is a long rock & roll tradition: writing songs about the high price of success in exhaustion, sanity and lasting relationships. Modern-rock stars Cage the Elephant take a turn on
Social Cues, their fifth studio album. And the bill comes due with a vengeance. “I was promised the keys to an empire,” singer Matt Shultz claims in the opening garage-rock sprint, “Broken Boy.” But he is already lost and fried in the next track, the title song. “I don’t have the strength to play nice,” Shultz admits against dirty-glam keyboards and space-cowboy steel guitar. “People always say/‘Man, at least you’re on the radio,’ ” he notes in the chorus. It sounds like cold comfort.
CAGE THE ELEPHANT
If this is an old story,
Social Cues is a dynamic, uncommon telling by a Kentucky-born band that has been hard to pin down since its 2009 breakout, “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” a 3-million-selling single with acoustic-bottleneck guitar, hip-hop stride and Shultz’s deceptively jaunty vocal bite — Iggy Pop with a Southern outcast’s edge.
Social Cues is full-on American gothic. The album was produced by John Hill, a surprising choice given his work with Eminem, Rihanna and Portugal. The Man. But Hill’s pop focus and Cage’s eccentric vigor generate a band-driven tension of cleverly drawn shadows and silver-lining choruses that suggest Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers if they had been raised on the Cure and Berlin-era David Bowie. The Bowie flourish in “Social Cues” is nearly literal, a curdled-synth lick descended from the one in “Ashes to Ashes.” “Night Running,” featuring Shultz in duet with Beck, is a midnight creep with dub-reggae effects à la the Clash’s Sandinista!
But the urgency here is all present tense. In “House of Glass,” guitarist Brad Shultz escalates the turbulence in his brother’s machine-gun rhyming with staccato bursts of wiry fuzz, while upper-cut power chords punctuate the brawny martial stomp of bassist Daniel Tichenor and drummer Jared Champion. And if “Tokyo Smoke” starts evoking the Cure’s early anguish, Cage finish it with a damaged grandeur as conflicted as their singer. As Shultz puts it, “My public smile, my double face/Half in the light, half in the shade/Need some fresh air, no place tonight.”
Cage the Elephant are not the first band to make a record about the reckoning and crossroads in rock & roll life. They won’t be the last. The lesson is obvious: Be careful what you wish for. But when it comes, get it down in vivid detail. By that measure, they pay these dues in full.