Concert Review: Cage the Elephant's Neon Pill Tour
With Young the Giant, Bakar, and Willow Avalon.
The last time I saw Cage the Elephant was in a headlining performance at Atlanta's Shaky Knees Festival in 2019. They were everything you imagine when you envision "rock stars" - an intense, intoxicated, crowdsurfing, rabble-rousing, nonsense-spewing, stage fire-punctuated experience. Now, just five years later, removed from a pandemic, substance abuse, an arrest, an extended break from touring, and, finally, a new album, Cage, many of them now in their 40s, have come out the other side now feeling like elders of the genre. They're no less exciting, but perhaps with this newfound awakening, understand that they have the potential to be first-ballot Hall of Famers.
As of publication, there are only six shows left in their Neon Pill tour, but if you live in/around one of the final six cities, the show is a must. You'll see one of our generation's great rock bands finally accepting some of their flowers, without missing a beat in their output and execution.
I had the chance to see them this past weekend at Philadelphia's Mann Center and it's a show I won't soon forget. For starters, Cage has three opening acts, which makes the evening feel like a mini-festival of sorts.
Truth be told, I may have been more excited to see Willow Avalon than anyone else. Willow is an up-and-coming country singer whose TikTok virality has only expedited the sound and image that she has more or less perfected in the past year. She tags many of her TikToks with #dollyparton and is clearly inspired by the country queen (she's even written a song about their similarities), but she's more like the auburn-haired girl that Dolly sings about. Her latest single "Homewrecker" is essentially Jolene's response to that eponymous song. "He only gave me his side of the truth / I ain't no heartbreaker / No, I didn't know her," she sings with the same country twang that comes out in her yodeling mimicry "Yodelayheewho." I've fallen in love with her music over the past few months, but this Philadelphia alt-rock crowd wasn't too interested. When she called her steel guitarist a southernly affectionate "darlin,'" the hipster crowd laying down next to me all yuckled "dArLin" as if they were doing bad impressions of Andy Griffith Show characters. Granted, she's an odd choice for this lineup, but she comes on three hours before the headliner. I'm looking forward to seeing her again in more friendly confines.
Next up is Bakar, another TikTok breakout, a young British rapper and a Love Island villa performer if I've ever seen one. Performing solo to his own tracks, Bakar is completely alone on stage. He's clearly very talented and song after song was catchy and clever, but that was just one of a few things working against him at our show. Over 10,000 people were expected in attendance and on a stage often occupied by symphony orchestras, he seemed to get swallowed whole by the amphitheater's cavernous setting. He also confessed that the previous night's show was at Madison Square Garden, which is obviously a dream for any musician, and that he had a "little bit too much fun last night." As a result, his voice got scratchier and scratchier as the set went on, constantly clearing his throat in between lyrics. He even admitted to cutting a song from the set so he could finish strong with his fan-favorite "Hell N Back." Youth has gotten the best of all of us, but a serious performer needs to take care of their body better than that. He was fun, nonetheless.
In anticipation of the show, I revisited the music of Young the Giant for the first time in maybe a decade. If you had asked me what I thought of their stuff before going into the show, I would have stolen Brad Pitt's great line in Moneyball ("There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap. And then there's us,") and rewritten it to say, "There's 'Cough Syrup' and 'Tightrope' and 'Mind Over Matter.' And then there's fifty feet of crap. And then there's the rest of the songs." Seeing them live convinced me that that is probably a little harsh, even if I'll never be a diehard fan. This satisfaction is largely because lead singer Sameer Gadhia has only sounded better with age, something you can't say about most rock singers. It's full and rich and well-rounded in a way that only enhances the music I can't completely fall in love with on the original studio tracks. I'll probably never play them in the car, but I'll enjoy another live set of theirs - I'm sure they'll end up on another of these lineups one day.
Three openers is a lot, but because I enjoyed them all in one way or another, Cage wasn't the reward after hard work, they were the exclamation point on a fantastic evening. And exclamatory they are. With six studio albums and almost two decades under their belt, they've amassed a catalog of hits so extensive that they can now curate a setlist completely devoid of duds - though even their b-sides could be another band's killer set. Early in the show, lead singer Matt Shultz promised to play the hits with the new stuff, as well as some "deep cuts, "and as they finished their ninety-minute set, I found myself asking, "Where were the deep cuts?" Their 23-song set is a stand-the-whole-time, no-skip selection of great tune after great tune, showcasing the longevity and talent required to craft a show made up of music from the very beginning to now.
A lot of their stage presence comes from Shultz, who rolled on stage, his knee on a scooter, as he unfortunately broke his foot during the tour. His limited mobility doesn't stop his never-aging voice, however, and his sobriety would probably put the stop on many of those previously synonymous rockstar-isms anyway. It's a good look for him. In between songs at that 2019 show I saw, he rambled and rambled and rambled about essentially nothing - he took it so far, in fact, that even the highest flyers among us began to ask, out loud, "What the hell is he talking about?" Knowing what we now know about his mental health journey, it's nice to see him physically (even on one foot), mentally, and vocally strong. His brother, rhythm guitarist Brad Shultz, also seems to be cooling off a bit in terms of the showmanship. In 2019, he crowd-surfed so many times and so deep into the large festival audience, he would often throw his guitar back onto the stage for a roadie to catch - it's amazing it worked out safely every time. He can still smash a guitar or two, but you have to keep up appearances.
But they don't need the theatrics. They're older and they're less silly, but they're no less awesome. Cage the Elephant is now eyeing another peak in their career, a new phase of maturity and self-aware honesty. If they keep this up (and if the last twenty years are any indication, they never seem to slow down), they could be looking at all-time status. Their shows are now just the evidence of such a debate. If you can't see them on this tour, you have to catch the next one.
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