r/CageTheElephant

This piano cover is so relaxing. Really makes you appreciate the melody which at this point is iconic.

Anyone know of other good piano covers of bright eyes songs?

I feel like calling it "beaches" is a way to get around radio censorship

Recently I've been listening to old playlists of mine from 15-20 years ago. CTE's first couple albums are featured heavily and I still hold them in extremely high regard. So I was pretty surprised when I came to this sub and saw that while not necessarily hated, most of the praise is directed at their newer stuff while the first few albums frequently come near the bottom of people's favorite album posts. I seem to be the the exact opposite. I have all their albums, but I really only listen the first first few.
 
What am I missing? I saw Cage the Elephant at Lollapalooza in 2011. It was absolutely pouring rain. Despite that Matt climbed the fence to the side of the stage, dive bombed off into the crowd, and landed right on top of where we were standing, kicking me in the head in the process. It was awesome and a core musical memory of mine. That's the Cage the Elephant I remember. Where songs like Sabre Tooth Tiger, Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked, and Tiny Little Robots always got the crowd going and were the reason people were there.
 
I know this take will rub people the wrong way, but what the hell prompted the dramatic shift in their sound? They went from an energetic take on garage/indie rock to just another overly produced indie pop act. Is it just a generational thing? Chasing the algorithm? The Spotify generation for whatever reason seems to avoid loud guitars and gravitates towards pop and soft hip hop.
 
I know bands age and their sound changes accordingly, but this seems more dramatic than usual.

Cage The Elephant has posted on their social media “Putting the finishing touches on the new album with new music coming soon! Thought we’d close out with a little Beaches in Tennessee” with a clip of Matt, Matthan, and Nick playing Beaches in Tennessee on a staircase.

So much hype now!!! I can’t wait

In the Dolby Atmos mix (available on Apple Music, TIDAL and other places), you can hear crickets and waves splashing in the two channels behind you. You can hear them if you own an iPhone, turn on “Head Tracked” mode with AirPods, and turn your head to the left or right.

You can hear the crickets during the first verse, and the waves splashing are more noticeable during the “i won’t live a lie” part towards the end of the song.

I noticed this yesterday and thought it was pretty awesome. Just wanted to share

As a decade old CTE fan, this is arguably their best song: the guitar and bass groove is hypnotic, the chorus has a beautiful vocal melody, the production has contrasts; it’s dark but has a euphoric mood.

I’ve seen like one video of them playing this live. I will admit this song is quite different from their discography. Nonetheless, it’s probably their most creative song.

All I can say is: Wow, I can't believe a band whose music used to evoke so much imagery and that I found so interesting ended up so... dull.

They were my favorite band in the early 2010s when 'Thank You Happy Birthday' was released. I was obsessed, listening to every song of theirs I could find. Every b-side, every radio appearance, etc. I absolutely adored Lincoln Parish's guitar playing. I remember how shocked I was when they started promoting 'Melophobia' and Lincoln was no longer part of the band.

Even though Lincoln left, I still held out hope for the future of the band because I had loved all their albums. Then 'Tell Me I'm Pretty' dropped and remains an album I've only listened to once. While Social Cues was released, and while I initially liked the songs I heard off the album, it wasn't enough to draw me to the album. Not because they sounded different; what I love about the first three albums is the variety of songs, but the new songs felt like filler. I couldn't help but feel Lincoln's playing was the secret sauce that made the band so good.

I do feel I have to point out how much the music industry also changed, as I pinpoint the mid 2010s as an era when a lot of my favorite bands' output started to decline. A time that saw the decline in music magazines and blogs in favor of algorithmically curated streaming playlists and social media feeds. The 2000s and early-2010s saw a rise in a bunch of fun new alternative bands, whereas when streaming services took over, I found much of the new 'alternative' artists being pushed to sound pretty uninteresting.

The kind of music computer code would choose for a playlist, over what a Radio DJ would select. I recently read the book 'Mood Machine' by Liz Pelly and one of the author's most prominent points is that Spotify (and other streaming services) cater to the 'lean-back listener', listeners who mostly use music as something in the background. And how this even affected how artists write music to fit better into these playlists.

Today I figured enough time had passed, and I decided to listen to Social Cues and Neon Pill with optimism. Needless to say, I was tremendously disappointed. Not because I found the albums to be bad; I just found them to be incredibly bland. The kind of music that's found on a Spotify playlist and put in the background, but nothing special. I do think the song 'Metaverse' off Neon Pill is a gem of a song.

One of the things that made Cage so special was that they had amazing deep album tracks. One of my favorites is 'Japanese Buffalo' off TYHB, which starts frantic with Matt screaming his verses, then breaks into a blissful chorus with some beautiful guitar. I was hoping for some more incredible deep cuts, but most of the songs seem to follow a pattern of: drum beat, funky bassline, vibes, repeat. It's almost as if the band sounds uninterested in the songs, almost like they're saying, 'we're not going to make any money off these, let's just make something the algorithm will like, and fans will still come out to hear our early hits'. The current guitarist still feels like a hired hand and not someone whose guitar is driving the songs like when Lincoln was in the band.

I honestly can't blame the band for these lacking albums, as I can't imagine how stressful it must be to be a musician in this current climate with constantly touring and album sales no longer a plausible source of revenue. From what I've heard, the shows are still great, but it seems to be struggling in the studio. I know Lincoln quit because he hated touring and wanted to focus more on producing; I hope that someday he'll join them in the studio again for an album and are able to recapture some of the magic.

Could also be the fact that I'm 30 and miss my teenage years.

Do you like the new song? Beaches of Tennessee? I do!

I have been listening to tons of Queens of the Stone Age, Ren and Black Sabbath over the past year. Excited to get back into Cage the Elephant. Awesome band. Discovering/re-discovering music you love is the best.

Interesting choice to have "visualizer" and music video. Cool enough, stoked for the new direction post RCA.

I keep getting snippets of this song with links to pre save it but none of them are from CTE themselves and they haven’t said anything about this song. These pre save links also don’t go anywhere official. I’m very suspicious of it considering how pervasive AI has become. I feel like it wouldn’t be difficult at this point to take other music from them and generate a new song.

If it has been addressed by the band I haven’t seen it anywhere so if any of yall have I’d love confirmation of whether it’s real or not.