Picture this: it’s roughly 2009, you’re in the closing years of high school, and when you get home you can’t wait to sit down in front of the TV – not for the thing itself, but for the Xbox 360 that’s hooked up to it. Next to you is a bulky CRT monitor for the family computer, and you can turn to it should you want to head to YouTube and watch videos in glorious 360p. While doing so, you see an ad for a game that might soon run on that machine next to you, a new IP called Borderlands – and the ad is eye-catching for the unique cel-shaded visuals it sports, but even more notable is the soundtrack they’ve opted to complement the game’s grungy, avaricious, quasi-Western world: a tune called “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by a band called Cage the Elephant. For a while, that song seems to be everywhere, having struck the exact right cultural note at the exact right time. It’s catchy without being vapid, and witty without being esoteric. And let’s say it’s among a few key factors that draw you, the listener, to expand your musical horizons.
Fast-forward just a bit, and you’ve started seeking out different music, both on that bulky CRT and on the radio, which is still a major thing – be it in the passenger seat of your parents’ cars, or while taking your own first drives in your own vehicle. Circa 2011, a few songs became quite inescapable, though not in a problematic way – ‘Cough Syrup’ and ‘My Body’ by Young the Giant were an impressive introduction to a band that sounded well-honed beyond their years, with a vocal liable to perk ears up from two cars over on a summer day.
Both Cage the Elephant and Young the Giant served as major musical touchstones for legions of people who were coming of age, and developing their own identities as listeners, in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It’s fortunate, then, that they’ve elected to tour together for much of 2024 as part of CtE’s Neon Pill tour, a rare chance to see a duo of acts, each still going strong in their own right, in a delightful amalgamation of songs, some new, some dear to people’s hearts for more than a decade.
Mind Over Matter Turns 10
Young the Giant’s focus for the evening is neither their latest record, 2022’s American Bollywood, nor their self-titled debut EP. Instead, it’s the tenth anniversary of their sophomore record, Mind Over Matter, that occupies their collective consciousness – they recently reissued it with four additional tracks, including 3 demos.
They place a song from both their eldest and newest projects in the show’s opening, with megahit ‘Cough Syrup’ coming third. After putting such a big song so early in the set, Gadhia takes a moment to address where they are as a live band. He says they “missed that feeling of feeling uncomfortable, feeling nervous” that they had early on. Five albums into their career, he says he wants to experiment with setlists from night to night, playing songs they don’t necessarily do often. It’s “not about being perfect, it’s about being human.” Gadhia’s voice soars through the massive open-air amphitheater at the Xfinity Center, and he walks over the gigantic subwoofers, reaching out toward the crowd. The passion and sincerity behind the music permeate the room. Guitarist Eric Cannata often steps to the front during big moments, when he’s not on synth, a role he takes up occasionally.
The set has a thoroughly rock-oriented midsection, starting with American Bollywood’s ‘Dollar $tore’. The song begins on the back of a tight drum rhythm courtesy of Francois Comtois, then after briefly alighting in the bridge, slams forward into a post-punk conclusion, with Payam Doostzadeh’s bass and one of the guitars matching each other, while another six-string wails a cyclone of sound around them. ‘God Made Man’, from their debut, is a stunning reminder of the raw power of Gadhia’s voice and the gorgeous instrumentation that made people fall in love with the band so quickly. While older songs always tend to hit harder live, ‘It’s About Time’ from Mind Over Matter has honed its notably sharper edge, its syncopated structure coming to a head with the titular refrain as the band is bathed in pure red light onstage.
A short lull leads into the tamer ‘Superposition’. Comtois takes a notable role guiding the backing vocals here, and the song’s serene heights demonstrate how the band’s dynamic versatility goes well beyond the hard rock that preceded. Ahead of the title track from Mind Over Matter, Gadhia again provides a glimpse into what the album meant to them then and now. He talks about always looking up to artists who were capable of changing their musical styles, and how the record represented a “big swing” they took to make something quite different than their debut. He speaks a line in metaphor about putting “the stitching that only you can see on the inside of your jacket”, about persevering and doing work to be true to themselves and not apologizing for who they are. “And if the world don’t break / I’ll be shaking it / ‘cause I’m a young man after all,” calls Gadhia’s past self by way of his present. He’s far from old now, but the decade has certainly seen much evolution in the band and likely an equal amount in the band members themselves, which seems to motivate the introspective tone he takes.Gadhia, who has already been consistently augmenting his vocal duties with guitar-playing as well as controlling a second microphone with a panel beneath it, brings out a vibraslap for ‘Silvertongue’, the penultimate song of the evening. And then all too soon the last song arrives, which of course is ‘My Body’: youthful, defiant, and radiant, it forms the perfect keystone to Young the Giant’s portion of the show, which has expertly managed to display the band’s multi-faceted present while keeping a pointed gaze on key aspects of their evolution.
A Bombastic, Broken Boy
Cage the Elephant’s Neon Pill tour certainly came with an unexpected note of prophecy. Months into their latest round of touring, opening nearly every show with ‘Broken Boy’, an early-August stop in Georgia saw singer Matt Shultz fall from the stage and break his foot. Not only did that show continue, but in the aftermath, he and his team devised a clever way for him to continue performing comfortably, and by the time they got to Massachusetts several weeks later, he’s long since mastered the new tech. Shultz wheels himself out onto the stage with his right leg resting in a beefy brace on the raised deck of a three-wheeled scooter, allowing him not only to remain upright but to effortlessly glide around the stage with a push from his operant foot. The chariot sports an upright attachment from between its handlebars, which turns out to be a GoPro. Whatever footage it records must be fantastic, as he’s embraced the irony of the ‘Broken Boy’ opener fully, riding his unconventional augmentation from side to side between verses as pyrotechnic jets hurl plumes of flame skyward from that very first song.
While Matt Shultz’s typical highly-mobile antics have been curtailed by his current state, brother, and guitarist Brad seems keen to be effervescent enough for the both of them. By the third song, he’s descended from the stage into the pit and quickly straddles the barrier, half of him leaning over among the front few rows. And for the big finish of ‘Spiderhead’ he jumps in completely, looking back toward the stage, a big smile gracing his face as equally elated expressions do everyone around him. Moreso even than the palpable heat of the flames bridging the divide between band and audience, Brad putting himself in the crowd binds the room together in a sense of lighthearted abandon. Back onstage, Matt does everything he can to stay animated atop his mobile pulpit short of leaping off of it and reinjuring itself – it’s not quite apparent if this is due to his leg being strapped in somehow, or simply a herculean level of restraint.
While the band draws on their album Social Cues for more songs here than Neon Pill, the title track of the latter in fact provides a nice parallel to breakout ‘Aint No Rest for the Wicked’. The twang of the guitars calls all the way back across 15 years, Shultz’s lyrical landscape is still volatile and untrustworthy. But the song moves a bit slower, with a bit more class, a couplet in French, altogether a bit more abstract – a perfect showcase for the band’s development. Another title track, that of Social Cues, finds its guitars more angular and bass more forceful than in its recorded version, recalling a sort of funk-inflected punk that might draw contemporary comparisons to a band like Spiritual Cramp. The band’s albums have always maintained a bristling psychedelic intensity, and that’s been made ever more prismatic album by album, song by song.
As the descending vocal scales structure ‘Halo’, a beach ball appears in the venue somehow, which manages to stay aloft for quite some time. ‘Trouble’ nods not only to the Pixies but cheekily deploys a reference to the song that follows it, quipping, “You know what they say, yeah / the wicked get no rest.” When they segue into that song, the crowd grows suitably enthused, so many likely recalling their first encounter with this tune, which may have pulled them down a path into weirder, wilder music.
There’s plenty of wild yet to come, particularly in the final one-two punch of the main set. Social Cues standout ‘House of Glass’ is the band firing on all cylinders, guitars trading off with brief solo fills from drummer Jared Champion, and call-and-response vocals pinging across a soundscape of fuzzy, noisy glory. The only thing that could surpass it is ‘Sabertooth Tiger’, one of the band’s most unhinged tunes which allows Matt Shultz to truly cut loose vocally in its chorus, leaning off the side of the scooter like he’s threatening to overturn himself. His exclamations turn wordless in the breakdown – this was a very memorable era of CtE; following their breakout with something like this on Thank You Happy Birthday felt wantonly chaotic and somehow dangerous. Brad tosses his guitar into the air behind the lingering smoke cloud from another salvo of fire, and the encore “break” is just a noisy feedback loop from the end of the song.
Funnily enough, the band opted for a slower conclusion to the night. ‘Shake Me Down’ and especially ‘Cigarette Daydreams’ prompt the biggest reactions from the crowd seen yet; a testament to how, on the reverse side of anger or antics or frenetic actions, exist these dark nights of the soul that the song describes so succinctly. Brad, who seemingly can magnetically perch himself on the edge of a PA wedge as effortlessly as the average person might stand upright, notices something through his pitch-black glasses: a father with a young child in his arms, sporting a pair of oversized earphones for protection. Shultz mouths the words as the kid bobs up and down in his dad’s arms. In one final song, the entire amphitheater seems to join together for the bridge of ‘Come A Little Closer’, which closes out the evening by unifying both the gentle and prickly sides of CtE’s writing styles in one song, along with just about 20,000 people singing along.
Photos and Words by Collin Heroux
