|
Music critics who have witnessed
the eye-popping spectacle that is a Cage the Elephant
live performance have likened the band’s singer to many things, among them “a
demented Bible Belt preacher,” “a Tasmanian
devil whooping and jumping up and down like a frenzied
gibbon.” And that’s just frontman Matt Shultz. The
verdict? “Exhilarating, 100 mph stuff,” raved
British indie music bible NME about one of the group’s
UK gigs last fall.
Cage the Elephant’s raucous live show — which
made this red-hot Kentucky-bred band the talk of this
year’s South-by-Southwest music festival, and led
USA Today to single them out as a band not to miss at
2009’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival — is
the perfect showcase for their buzzed-about self-titled
debut album for Jive Records. Recorded over 10 days with
Grammy Award-winning producer Jay Joyce, and a Top 40
hit when it was released on British indie label Relentless
in the U.K. last June, the album is a genre-defying blend
of rock n roll and raw youthful punk energy all propelled
by Matt’s taunting, Dylan-esque rhythmic vocal
delivery, Brad Shultz and Lincoln Parish’s furious
twin guitar assault, and bassist Daniel Tichenor and
drummer Jared Champion’s rock-steady funk grooves.
“The music comes from a
pure place,” Matt says. We really like
the energy of music that feels passionate, raw, unplanned
emotion. That’s
what we were really trying to capture in the studio.”
And although the grooves are
designed to make you move, there’s more going
on in these punk funk tunes than the reckless abandonment
that first meet the ear. Lyricist Matt tells stories
about his life. The first single off of the album is “Ain’t
No Rest for the Wicked,” in which Matt describes
being mugged by a drug dealer and picking up a young
female hitch-hiker he soon finds out is a prostitute. “That
song is about realizing that everyone’s got a back-story
and that essentially we’re all the same,” he
says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re
a priest, a coke dealer, or a prostitute; we all struggle
with the same things, so how can we sit in judgment of
others when each of us has something in our closet that
we’d never tell anyone.”
Or like his experience dealing
with shady shit-talkers on the instantly addictive
track “In One Ear” (sample
lyric: “They say I’m just a stupid kid /
another crazy radical / rock n’ roll is dead /
I probably should have stayed in school / Another generation
X / who somehow slipped up through the cracks / Oh they’d
love to see me fall / But I’m already on my back”),
then tackles corruption and hypocrisy on “James
Brown” and religion and war on “Lotus.”
Throughout the album’s 11-song cycle, Matt’s
frustration with society is readily apparent. “But
mostly you can hear the frustration I have in myself,” he
says. “Like why did I buy into certain things the
world has sold me? That’s where I was coming from
when I wrote the songs — just looking at the world
and realizing it’s full of hypocrites and I’m
one too.”
Given Matt’s background,
it’s not surprising
that such searching subject matter would find its way
into Cage the Elephant’s songs. The band members
hail from Bowling Green, Kentucky — a town where
working in the nearby Chevrolet assembly plant or Fruit
of the Loom headquarters were the main employment games
in town. “It was the kind of place where if you
didn’t play football, or you were a little bit
different, people thought you were gay,” Matt says. “I
didn’t want to be part of that jock world. I liked
music so I quit the football team when I was a junior
and started a band. Forming Cage the Elephant was
a rebellious thing — a way for us to carve out
our own path instead of following the path created by
the community that surrounded us.”
The Shultz brothers grew up poor,
sharing a tiny room in the family’s two-bedroom apartment with two
other siblings. “Our dad drove a supply truck and
he was gone a lot,” Matt recalls. “There
wasn’t a lot of money or anything to do so we would
make up goofy songs to pass the time.” At age 12,
Brad bought a beat-up guitar from a neighborhood kid
for $20 that he played until it literally fell apart.
Not long after their parents were divorced, Brad snuck
home a cassette of Jimi Hendrix’s Live at Woodstock,
which the brothers listened to obsessively for three
years, cementing their love for rock and roll. A few
years later, Matt bought Bob Dylan’s The Times
They Are a-Changin’. “That was a huge, life-changing
album for me.” he says. “Just the honesty
inDylan’s music and how he looked at society, it
really opened my eyes to how blind we really are.” After
the brothers’ parents divorced, the music
floodgates opened and they began to devour everything
they could find from the Beatles, The Ramones, Led Zeppelin,
Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Nirvana, and the Pixies,
to name but a few.
“A lot of bands put themselves in a box and say, ‘We’re not
going to be influenced by anything,’ Matt says. “We don’t
mind being influenced though. I don’t think you should force influence
but to fight against it would be like fighting against nature. You
have a responsibility to innovate but a lot of the time people allow pretentiousness
to taint their innovation and what you end up with is very contrived soulless
music. Everything we love about music we wanted to putin our own music.
When it comes down to it, we just want to make music that we love.”
|
©2010
Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival | Privacy
Policy | Terms
of Use | Site by Fast
Atmosphere
