Cage the Elephant. “Thank You Happy Birthday.” Jive.
Matt Shultz’s scratchy, wobbly, jumpy voice isn’t pretty. But it is the perfect instrument for the manic desperation and sardonic defiance of his band, Cage the Elephant. Formed in Bowling Green, Ky., Cage the Elephant had enough success with its self-titled debut album – extensive touring and widespread rock radio airplay for hard-headed singles like “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” and “Back Against the Wall” – to embolden the band on its second, “Thank You Happy Birthday.”
The new album is more abrasive, rowdier, more unstable and pushier in the right ways. Where “Cage the Elephant” glanced at the Rolling Stones, punk, grunge and Kings of Leon, the new album throws in post-punk, the Pixies, more electronic effects and more flat-out hollering from Shultz.
The music can swerve in odd directions, like “2024,” which opens with an electronic swoop, introduces a serviceable upbeat guitar riff, speeds up and tosses that riff aside to change keys for a galloping punk-pop song – which, minutes later, is interrupted once more by that opening riff.
The songs spare no one, even the band’s peer group. Guitars churn frantically in “Sell Yourself” as Shultz sputters, “I know your type, I know exactly what you want to do/and if the money’s right, you think I’ll just agree.” Amid the dissonant surf-rock of “Indy Kidz” Shultz sneers, “I wanna be just like you.”
Mere punk insolence would be too one-dimensional for Cage the Elephant. Its slower songs – still frayed with noise – counsel perseverance against any odds. “Flow” marches steadily, with snare-drum rolls and screams in the background, as Mr. Shultz sings, “Dead and gone, so long, hold on.” And there are two versions of “Right Before My Eyes,” which declares, “I can’t take this anymore it breaks my mind.” One is a paradoxically upbeat surf-rocker with big harmony choruses; the other is a hidden track that closes the album. Played quietly, like a Beatles ballad, it’s brave enough to set bravado aside.
– Jon Pareles, c. New York Times News Service
Electric Wizard. “Black Masses.” Metal Blade.
The imperative behind most doom metal is one that’s useful for nearly all musicians: Make a noise that’s as inevitable and incontrovertible as possible. Make it seem as if that slow and low, scrofulous power chord was already sounding before you got there and will be sounding long after you’re dead. All you’re doing is keeping it aloft for a while.
On “Black Masses,” this English band’s seventh album, songs arise and dissolve in wheezes of feedback. Single-note riffs get pushed through old amps and a flagon of echo. It’s almost palpable music: blocks of sound with shape and density.
“Black Masses” is more or less a re-enactment of the narrowest understanding of early Black Sabbath. And except for the last track, “Crypt of Drugula” – nine instrumental minutes with a two-chord vamp in the background and stormy rumblings up front – it’s not as abject and feral, or nearly as exciting, as “Dopethrone,” from 2000, this band’s high-water mark. Instead it’s focused and unmovable and sort of artisanal. It’s something to be admired. It’s a dry stone wall. You may sit on it. It will bear your weight.
– Ben Ratliff, c. New York Times News Service
Joe Lovano Us Five. “Bird Songs.” Blue Note.
Every now and again during his 20-year tenure on Blue Note the saxophonist Joe Lovano has delivered a tribute, a tip of the fedora to Frank Sinatra or Enrico Caruso or the bebop composer Tadd Dameron. The subject on “Bird Songs” is Charlie Parker: bop’s blazing paragon and a saxophonist of superhuman craft. But this album doesn’t set out to shadowbox with Parker’s genius. What Lovano is after is simpler and more slippery and better suited to his particular gifts.
This is Lovano’s second album with the band he calls Us Five: James Weidman on piano, Esperanza Spalding on bass, and both Otis Brown III and Francisco Mela on drums. (The first album, “Folk Art,” released on Blue Note in 2009, was widely acclaimed.)
The band has a springy, texture rich, intriguingly destabilized rapport, with its two drummers engaging either in clattering dialogue or a washy tandem. The elastic interplay of Us Five is the main point of “Bird Songs.” The songs are subjected to unforeseen slowdowns, extended sidebars and more than a little reconstructive surgery, as Lovano threads his solo commentary, sibilant but suave, through the nub of the action.
A word about that reconstruction, though: It occurs often enough, in the same way, to start to feel like a mannerism.
– Nate Chinen, c. New York Times News Service