Cage The Elephant - Thank You, Happy Birthday

The problem with making rock music is that you’re often left with the burden of sticking to one, specific sound. Take Kings Of Leon for example who, upon moving from inventive, roots-heavy Rockabilly rock towards the lights of a stadium, managed to alienate half of their original fan-base (whilst picking up millions of new recruits, it ought to be noted).

When you first hear ‘Shake Me Down’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Cage The Elephant, a band renowned for jarring venue walls with thick, heavy sound, might have done the same. It’s a no-strings-attached, straight-up pop song, one that’s being added onto every other major radio station’s playlist because it follows a routine, streamlined formula of being catchy and ever so nice. While it’s the song that’ll be responsible for the vast majority of ‘Thank You, Happy Birthday’’s sales, it’s hardly indicative of the rest of the record; a generous, varying collection of songs.

Going back to the earliest point, this record is, as it happens, disloyal to the sound that careered around the band’s self-titled debut. Yet in detaching from a sound of old, the Kentucky five-piece appear to have struggled to discover a new, fully-formed image and every attempt at something new sounds forced, overdone. ‘Sell Yourself’ is offensively bombastic; Matt Shultz characterising himself as some sort of aggressive bar-goer after one too many. The track quite perplexingly then resorts to using robot vocals amongst a backdrop of angsty, ear-shredding guitars. The following track, ‘Rubber Ball’, approved for twee McDonalds commercials, is the exact opposite.

A lack of identity, lack of cohesiveness, is arguably worse than having an album full of ‘Shake Me Down’s. Some songs here have real character and integrity; ‘Right Before My Eyes’ is sharp; Shultz’s vocals crisp and clear amongst a stylish, atmospheric rhythm section. ‘Aberdeen’ shows glimpses of a late-Modest Mouse (an equally-evident characteristic of ‘Japanese Buffalo’); gritted-teeth and a cool swagger. There’s no doubting the ambition beneath the sound, but in experimenting with ideas a-plenty, Cage The Elephant have missed the boat in making an album with coherence and charm.