Alt-rock megastars Cage the Elephant have won two Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album of the year, and I think I know why: they’re boring. Toothless. Bland. Not out to make any waves. They’re the Whitney Houston of alternative rock, and proof that playing it safe is a sure-fire way to win the hearts and minds of the middle-of-the-road industry types who hand out the big prizes. Phil Collins would be proud.
It wasn’t always thus. Before they settled upon utter vapidity as cunning career strategy Cage the Elephant produced some moderately exciting blues and punk music—the Pixies get cited a lot—but time and craven ambition seem to have sandblasted what rough edges they had right off of them.
Compare their eponymous 2008 debut (and songs like “In One Ear” and “Free Love”) to 2020’s anodyne Social Cues and what you’ll hear is an elephant that decided to cage itself out of fear that running amok might impact sales or, even worse, alienate the music industry insiders who shape posterity. Just take a gander at this year’s slate of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees. Mariah Carey. The Dave Matthews Band. Sade. Lenny Kravitz. Lenny Kravitz!! When it comes to the rock industrial complex, playing it safe is playing it smart. And taking chances is chancy.
If Cage the Elephant’s grand strategy is to be out-tame Tame Impala, I congratulate them on their success. (Perfect name for supergroup: Tame the Elephant.) On the Grammy-winning Social Cues the six-piece (which was a four-piece until 2017) combine anything-but-enthralling dance rhythms (it’s telling that their real drummer does an impressive imitation of a drum machine throughout) with anything-but-enthralling pop/New Wave melodies topped by lead vox Matt Shultz’s mostly pureed vocals and depressingly generic lyrics.
Cage the Elephant make a few tentative stabs at generating some electricity, but they sound half-hearted. They’re a hopelessly risk-averse bunch, these boys, and never, ever veer into the passing lane or exceed the legal speed limit. You risk a speeding ticket, your insurance premiums go up, and the next thing you know Coachella isn’t answering your phone calls. Why chance it?
Social Cues is a Bic safety razor of an album—it’s completely safe and 100 percent disposable. Vinyl rarely sounds this plastic. “Broken Boy” opens on a vaguely industrial note; you get some almost promising noise, then the drums kick in, hard and fast, and this is as close as the band gets to generating some real heat. But the turning-Japanese guitar riff is a cliche, the rhythm and melody are perfunctory electro-punk, and Shultz’s attempt to sound tough comes off as bad performance art.
The guy has zero charisma and even less personality, and the lyrics (“I was born on the wrong side of the train tracks/I was raised with a strap across my back”) are pure paint-by-numbers. I’m not certain who writes ‘em (I’m pretty sure it’s Shultz), but the lyrics of every single song on Social Cues seem to have been cobbled them together from A Child’s First Book of Rock Cliches. It’s downright impressive how good these guys are at saying absolutely nothing in the least interesting way possible.
The up-tempo title track seems to have been written after listening to David Bowie’s Low about a thousand times, or at least the recurring synthesizer riff does. Sounds promising, that, but the song itself seems to have been produced by the studio kitchen’s smoothie blender. It’s homogenized slick and safe as pasteurized milk. And I don’t know who Shultz is referring to when he sings “At least you’re on the radio, oh,” but it sounds like Marxist self-criticism to me.
Shultz is equally accusatory on the mid-tempo tepid “Black Madonna.” Its only redeeming feature is its inexplicably memorable chorus—I don’t know how they let it slip through their stringent process of eliminating anything that points towards the band’s having an actual personality. Again the lyrics are a wash; lines like “Black Madonna, my black flower/Nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide” seem to have been produced by random hackneyed phrase generator, and if this is future of rock I say it’s time to drop the big one.
“Night Running” features a lackluster reggae-lite beat and a sickly guitar line, leaving you with nothing but the super-streamlined vocals and a sad-sack set of lyrics that leave no stultifying cliche unturned. Although I have to hand it to that “Sentimental flowers don’t grow.” Its meaningless stupidity actually makes me chuckle. Meanwhile, “Skin and Bones” is syncopated slick and has Shultz on the run, again. And incapable of saying a single original thing, again. I could swear I’ve heard this song before, and guess what I have, because it sounds pretty much like every other song on the album.
Take “Ready to Let Go.” You get the same monotonous vocal delivery, the same dreary and predictable beat, the same nondescript and airbrushed melody, and the same trite lyrics—the truly amazing thing about the lines “Sun went down, sun went down over Pompeii/On both sides the vow was broken/Oh my my, I’m the one/Trying to hide this damage done/One day, all our secrets will be spoken” isn’t their insufferable generality and defiant refusal to mean anything. It’s that “Pompeii”—it’s a real, concrete thing, an actual place, and how it managed to sneak into the nonstop parade of po-faced tropes is beyond me.
“House of Glass” features a dark and rumbling groove that passes muster, if barely. What’s more, the backing vocalists have actual personality and the band makes a pale semblance of a din. And it doesn’t sound disconcertingly like most of the other songs on the album. All of that said, the Little River Band could do better and I intend never to listen to it again. And the same goes for slow with faux strings “Love’s the Only Way.” Think low-rent Mercury Rev, then spare yourself the so-called pleasure of listening to it and listen to them instead.
“The War Is Over” is a mid-tempo so-what of a song; it has a cool drum beat going for it but very little else, unless you count the very low-grade catchy melody. Unfortunately these meager attributes are undone by the lyrics, which are unspeakable dreck:
“I came upon a wise man
He said, “Sit beside me son”
“When I was a young man, I was like you, the Prodigal Son”
Safe behind a half-smile, hidin’ in the shadows
Tell ’em that it’s all right, tell ’em ’cause you said so.”
Unpardonable shlock that, and bogus to boot—a real wise man would tell the boys to spring for a thesaurus and take a creative writing class. It’s followed by the only song on the album I can listen to because it has a smidgeon of character, “Dance Dance.” The intro has guitar muscle, the band makes a bit of racket, and when things slow down and Shultz sings “Dance, dance, dance,” I actually stop and pay attention as I do nowhere else on the album. I don’t have much to say about “What I’m Becoming” other than it’s a nonentity rendered dangerous by synthesized strings that are pure conformist MOR shlock.
“Tokyo Smoke” has a promising title but fits neatly into the mold of the other songs. The band does its best to keep the excitement on the down low, neatly negating the song’s propulsion, and the lyrics “Stay between the lines/Make your mark” could be the band’s mission statement. As usual Shultz aims for the monotone and hits the target dead in the center, but I think that’s the point—the guy’s too cool to feel even as he’s trying to convince you he has feelings.
Closer “Goodbye” is the odd man out, a slow piano ballad on which, to give him credit, Shultz tries to convey authentic emotion, but what you’re left with in the end is the worst Coldplay song ever. It’s my understanding that the LP’s “theme” is Shultz’s divorce, and if so I suspect the reason things didn’t work out is because he drove his significant other to the brink of homicide by speaking in nothing but cliches.
Social Cues offers the listener nothing—there’s nary a trace of humor, it takes zero chances, and the unrelenting sameness of its songs is ultimately smothering. Music is supposed to say something, make you feel something, take you somewhere you’ve never been before. Social Cues fails on all counts. No wonder it won a Grammy. It conforms unapologetically to the great rock mean. Social Cues is less an album than an indictment against the music industry.
Cage the Elephant are one of the dullest animals in the alt-rock zoo. And they’re dull, it seems, by intention—their tedium is aspirational. They’re not caged because they’re dangerous, the way, say, panthers are. They’re caged because they want to be—cages are safe places and hence the perfect places to make safe music. If these guys are the gold standard of alternative music, alternative music is dead and good riddance. Fortunately, they aren’t. I don’t want to cage the elephant. I simply want it to shut up.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D
