Cage the Elephant will light up the Rialto Theatre with J. Roddy Walston and The Business and Bear Hands tonight.
Matt Shultz, Brad Shultz, Daniel Tichenor and Jared Champion make up the rock band from Kentucky. Cage the Elephant uses eloquently flowing lyrics, rough guitar licks and each member’s hipster style to spawn an aura that is truly their own.
“Kentucky’s Cage the Elephant warp Sixties garage rock, Seventies punk and Eighties alt-rock into excellently weird new shapes,” a Rolling Stone review of the band said, “like the way a Beatles reference bumps up against chaotic horns and deranged Pixies crooning on ‘Hypocrite.’”
Cage the Elephant earned a spot in the rock history books with its song “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” off of the group’s 2009 self-titled album. It is no surprise the band has sold out its show at the Rialto.
Cage the Elephant will be playing songs from its third album, Melophobia, which means the fear of music and took the band about a year to finalize.
“I wanted the making of this music to be comparable to drawing your childhood house purely from memory,” said Shultz, the lead singer and main writer of the new album, on the band’s website. “Your mind recreates things that aren’t based so much on physical truth but more based on emotion.”
Rachel Doser, a pre-neuroscience freshman, saw Cage the Elephant perform at Kino Veterans Memorial Stadium at KFMA Day in 2012.
“I can’t remember falling in love with their music or a time when I didn’t listen to them, so I guess I’ve been a pretty solid fan,” Doser said. At the show she saw, Cage the Elephant played with other rock bands, and Doser said, “Their personal performance was up to par with the rest of them. All the shows that stick in my head are ones where the members make the audience ecstatic to be there with other actions other than just their performance.
”Cage the Elephant will play with two other groups tonight: J. Roddy Walston and The Business and Bear Hands. J. Roddy Walston and The Business is a rock band from Cleveland. Their newest album, titled Essential Tremors, took its name from a nervous-system disorder that the band’s frontman has long had to deal with, which occasionally causes his hands to shake uncontrollably. This hasn’t stopped the band from creating a sound that is an infectious mixture of its Southern roots and Led Zeppelin.
Bear Hands is a punk rock band that will be traveling with its new album Distraction. Bear Hands’ music is fun, loud and easy to dance to, which makes it no surprise that Cage the Elephant added them to the show.
The show is general admission standing room only, and sold out. The doors open at 7 p.m., and the show starts at 8 p.m.
