[ATTENDED: August 20, 2019] Cage the Elephant
I was rather surprised that Cage the Elephant were co-headlining this tour with Beck. I assumed that Beck was the clear headliner–and yet the (younger) crowd seemed to be there more for Cage. I also didn’t realize that they had collaborated recently on the song that this tour was named after).
But the biggest confusion for me was that I didn’t know who Cage the Elephant were. They were part of that trend of bands that had three words with The in the middle. Like Pedro the Lion, Jukebox the Ghost, Minus the Bear and Young the Giant. I assumed that I had no idea who Cage the Elephant were or what hey even sounded like.
But then I was surprised to discover that I really liked two of their songs but had no idea it was them: “Ready to Let Go” and “Mess Around.” After figuring that out, I was looking forward to them but really had no idea what to expect.
Well, they went on about ten minutes late (which was annoying, since they’d had 30 minutes to get ready).
Their stage set up was like bleachers–a guitar drum and keyboards on the top and a guitar vocals and bass on the floor. Then the lights went down and the stage burst into flames!
There was pyro on both sides of the stage and as lead singer Matt Shultz came running out from backstage a couple of large fireballs shot into the air.
This is not what I was expecting.
From then on the whole set was basically the Matt Shultz show. The rest of the band: rhythm guitarist Brad Shultz, lead guitarist Nick Bockrath, guitarist and keyboardist Matthan Minster, bassist Daniel Tichenor, and drummer Jared Champion hardly moved the whole night.
I had to watch a different live video of them to see if that was always the case–it wasn’t. In Bonnaroo 2017 the band is very mobile. Well, it turns out that Bockrath really hurt his leg back in June, so that might explain why he was up at the top of the stage sitting in a chair for the whole show. During Beck’s set it sounded like Beck said that Brad Shultz was also injured. I don’t really know what he looks like so I’m not sure if that was him playing or not. But it seems that Brad is also a bit of a lunatic onstage. Who ever played rhythm guitar did not do much at our show, either.
So it was very interesting to see a band that I knew two songs (which sound very different) but not knowing what else to expect from them.
They played six songs from their recently released album Social Cues. I found I enjoyed all of these songs quite a lot. They mostly rocked pretty hard with some great catchy guitars. There was a cool drum break in the middle of opener “Broken Boy,” while “Social Cues” was a lot more synthy. I was trying to determine who I felt some of these newer songs sounded like and I realized that both “Social Cues” and “Skin and Bones” reminded me of the New York band Chappo. If you like Cage the Elephant, check out Chappo).
I was also really fond of a lot of the bass lines from Tichenor, especially the ones in the new song “House of Glass” and “Come a Little Closer” from 2013’s Melophobia. They played four more songs from that album, including the moody and theatrical “It’s Just Forever” and “Telescope” which started off mellow but had a rollicking middle section.
I have yet to mention frontman Matt Shulz because his performance was so over the top that it practically needs its own section.
Like just about every male this hot evening, he came out in a suit jacket (white with pink and blue circles all over it) and long pants. He also had on a large had and a black glove (?). When he first stomped around the stage his hat and sunglasses pretty much obscured his face (I didn’t realize that on other shows he was wearing a beekeeper’s hood in the beginning, so I guess that’s part of the show.
But dressed like that he proceeded to leap, swagger, fall and slide all over the stage. He had a bag around his shoulder and another hat which he carried around for a time.
S. and I had both agreed that he seemed like a combination of Beck (the dress sense and how he looked) and Mick Jagger. He was the center of attention and loved every second of it. The band rocked out and the stomping chords of “Crybaby” perfectly suited his manic energy.
He walked around the stage, going to both sides, high-fiving people up front and being an unforgettable showman.
At one point he was lying on the stage in some strange position when something fell out of his pocket (I assumed it was something thrown on the stage, but he explained it was a picture someone had given to him. He unfolded and proceeded to wax-poetically about how beautiful and meaningful it was. But that moment of seriousness didn’t last too long.
Then when it came to “Cold Cold Cold” he ran out into the crowd and up the aisle. We all took pictures but none of mine came out. The song ended while he was still out there, so from the back of someone’s seat (he was clearly walking across the tops of seats), he instructed the band to start “Ready to Let Go,” and we all went nuts while he sang from the middle of the fans.
About midway through the set he took off his panama hat and replaced it with a leather hat. A fan offered him his own hat which he put on briefly but then returned to his leather cap. Later he took off the white coat to reveal an orange or red silk kinda of coat (he must have been SO HOT!). It’s hard to tell the color of that jacket because in one picture it was red and the other it was clearly orange. He hung his jacket on the microphone stand (which he had hung his satchel on earlier).
A few songs later, he took off the silk jacket to reveal a black sequined shirt.
Eventually he went into that black bag and pulled out a different baseball cap. I was amused that at some point it was a woman’s job to come out and fetch all of his discarded clothes.
I was most excited to hear the songs I knew of course. So I was psyched they played “Mess Around” which is on their 2015 album Tell Me I’m Pretty. They played a total of five songs from that album, like the swagger-filled “Too Late to Say Goodbye” and “Trouble” which had a fun “oooh” middle section that they stretched out and jammed as we all “oooh’d” along. So they were really sampling from their whole catalog.
They played 19 songs in total which means there was one each form their first and second albums.
Somewhere around that song, Matt took off the black sequined shirt to reveal yet another shirt! It had cooled off by then, but holy moley, the layers!
The oldest song was “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” from their self-titled debut. It sounded vaguely familiar and I wonder if it just sounded familiar or if I had heard it back in 2008 as it was kind of an alt-rock hit.
I didn’t really know many of the songs, but some of them did sound familiar. Had I heard them somewhere and not known it was them? Very likely. Or do their songs all sound kind of the same so by the end everything sounded familiar? I’m not really sure. Either way I enjoyed the heck out of it.
A song or two before the end of the set, a huge cloud of fog was released on stage. It enveloped Matt.
S. and I agreed after the show that we were sure he was just going to be gone when the smoke cleared. But indeed, he was not. While in the fog, he had clearly stripped off the remainder of his clothes to reveal a kind of body stocking and red running shorts. Wow.
This new outfit suited him most and he sprang around the stage, jumping and getting everyone totally psyched.
They ended the show with “Teeth” a song that went into an absolutely chaotic and wonderfully insane ending. There was more fire and strobing lights and eventually as the song finished, Shultz ran out into the crowd one more time, presumably for good.
The band started to leave the stage to the strains of “We Are the Champions,” and then we heard the hubub from the back of the seated section. It turns out Matt had gone all the way back to the end row of seats and was standing on the chairs with his arms in the air. I read online that he jumped out into the lawn area too.
This was a simply unforgettable performance. I hate to say that he totally overshadowed the music, but he really did. Buy the end of the show I was far more interested in what he was going to do than in what they were playing.
Nevertheless, I came away with a great feeling about the band and their music.
And I would totally see them again, no question.
It also meant that Beck had a really tough act to follow.
SETLIST
“Broken Boy” ©
“Cry Baby” ℘
“Spiderhead” ϖ
“Too Late to Say Goodbye” ℘
“Cold Cold Cold” ℘
“Ready to Let Go” ©
“Social Cues” ©
“Tokyo Smoke” ©
“Mess Around” ℘
“Trouble” ℘
“Skin and Bones” ©
“Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” ç
“It’s Just Forever” ϖ
“Telescope” ϖ
“House of Glass” ©
“Come a Little Closer” ϖ
“Shake Me Down” β
“Cigarette Daydreams” ϖ
“Teeth” ϖ
ç Cage the Elephant (2008)
β Thank You Happy Birthday (2011)
ϖ Melophobia (2013)
℘ Tell Me I’m Pretty (2015)
© Social Cues (2019)
I Just Read About That... 
Leave a comment