Now Playing: 'In One Ear' and 'Ain't No Rest For The Wicked' from Cage The Elephant's self-titled debut

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What opportune timing Cage The Elephant (or rather, their record label) has. After the announcement came down that Jack White would be embarking upon another side project apart from The White Stripes and The Raconteurs (for those that don't know, it's called Dead Weather and also features members of The Kills), Cage The Elephant's self-titled debut – which has been out in Europe since the middle of 2008 – finally sees release in North America. As “In One Ear” rolls out, it'd be very easy to assume the band is just a group of designer Jack-White-Stripes impostors (particularly given singer Matt Shultz' White-ish predisposition to nasaloid barking) thrown to the wolves to make a quick buck off of the unwary but, if you listen a little closer and think about it, the excitement around Cage The Elephant is warranted; not one song in these eleven comes up short.

From the opening petulant rant of “In One Ear,” Cage The Elephant swaggers along like five street walking cheetahs with hearts chock full of napalm and set fire to every naysaying critic in sight while simultaneously identifying with the new underground, the underworld (check “Ain't No Rest For The Wicked”) and rock n' roll both classic and indie. There's no faulting that scale of ambition, but there's no faulting the results either; by combining a healthy dose of vintage Motor City mayhem (think MC5, The Stooges, Ted Nugent) with an equal amount of the aestheticism typically associated with new indie (dirty and amphetamine-fuelled pop structures like those of The White Stripes, The Hives and The Vines before they fell apart) and sinewy guitar fire, Cage The Elephant assembles a set of tunes that could play as well at street level as they could in a stadium and made all the more salacious because at no point does the band outright express an ambition or allegiance to either. Songs like “No Rest For The Wicked,” “Back Against The Wall” and “Back Stabbin' Betty” all simply play out like the work of a band that genuinely believes rocking out and making a crowd swoon is its own best reward (doubt it? Check the lyric sheet for “In One Ear” for proof) and, because they don't hold back for a second and don't play it safe ever, makes anyone listening want to shake their hair in front of their eyes, scream on believe in the band too.

That infectious, 'damn the torpedoes' attitude dominates every micro-tone of the album. At every turn through Cage The Elephant, the band goes for broke and doesn't pull a punch which makes Shultz push his voice beyond its limits at regular intervals through the record's run-time and, while that magical meltdown point always seems apparent, the band always pulls the proceedings back from the brink and just takes it on home. That earnest spirit coupled with Cage The Elephant's ability to simply roll out songs that get stuck in the minds of anyone that hears them is what gets this album over. There's no telling how long it'll last for the band (who ever knows for sure in the music business?) but, here, Cage The Elephant gives cocksure, snotty and smart-assed an all-new, golden sheen again.

Artist:
Cage The Elephant online
Cage The Elephant myspace

Download:
Tiny Little Robots from Cage The Elephant.

Album:
Cage The Elephant's self-titled debut is out now and available here on Amazon .