ABOUT

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.”

“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.”