Album Review: Thank You-Happy Birthday, Cage The Elephant

4/5

By:Captain Pownzor

Staff Blogger

So I sat down and took a listen to the sophomore release from Cage The Elephant Thank You Happy Birthday. If I'm honest I wasn’t expecting too much. Maybe 3 decent radio friendly singles a typical slump of a second album. But this is not what I got. The band has evolved I would say for the better.

With various electronic sampling on songs like Sell Yourself and Always Something even some slow jams like Rubber Ball show a different side from the punky, acid, funky rock jams of the bands debut album.

Indi Kidz is a loaded gun aimed squarely at some of the lack of individuality in rehashed styles of the present. Moaning with an angsty tone about the need to “Get the right haircut” and be “Just like you”, Cage The Elephant will have a great number of fans singing along with them in unison to this mocking spacey track.

Aberdeen is a radio ready single that reads like a dear john letter and wont get out of my head after the first listen. It is by far one of the strongest tracks on the album.

If you have ever seen Cage The Elephant live, you will come to expect a pure wall of sound coming from a group of people clearly running on nothing but a handful of pills. Therefore nothing short of memorable. Sabertooth Tiger channels this down to its roots.

The two closers Japanese Buffalo and Flow don’t amp you up but bring you down like a bad comedown. Japanese Buffalo comes across as a rehashed 50’s era song punked up and drugged out. And Flow is a half campfire singalong song that plays the album out in style.

Overall the album is a solid one, I was really very surprised with it. There are some misses with the sound being kind of all over the place. But it offers a nice variety I didn’t think the band was really capable of expressing. Definitely have seen some evolution since the debut and I know that this will be playing in heavy rotation for me for quite some time.