Cage The Elephant’s latest album, Unpeeled is a collection of live recordings from their recent tour, which saw the band performing reimagined versions of their tracks with the aid of a string quartet and additional percussive instruments.
The album contains 21 tracks, including 18 songs off the band’s past albums and a handful of covers, such as Wreckless Eric’s Whole Wide World, Daft Punk’s Instant Crush and Golden Brown by The Stranglers. Cage The Elephant manage to mould each track into something new, so much so that if you didn’t know better, you’d think the band had penned these songs themselves.
By tweaking the melodies of their own tracks through adding and subtracting different elements, they manage to give each song an almost completely new feel. Cry Baby displays a Middle Eastern-inspired sound, Too Late To Say Goodbye is brimming with dramatic, sweeping violin melodies, and Aberdeen feels like a beautifully chaotic unravelling of the original track.
If you’re a Cage The Elephant fan, you’ll know the original versions of these tracks are great as is, but the Unpeeled re-workings are done so meticulously it’s as if the songs were written to be played in this manner. By removing everything except the base elements of each track and adding simple string and percussive arrangements, the listener is able to truly appreciate the depth of the lyrics and the heart of each song.
The live element of the album means you can hear the crowd chanting the chorus on tracks like Shake Me Down and Trouble, as well as cheering at the beginning and end of a handful of others. Rather than being distracting, this quality feels intentional as it adds a distinctive atmospheric vibe to the songs. Despite being a live album, the sound is so pristine across the recordings that the crowd’s cheers are the only giveaway that the tracks are live performances.
The concept behind Unpeeled is a clever idea, as well as a great way to give fans new music without the band having to write any new songs. The record is truly special, it’s swimming with so many moods, emotions and musical elements that it grabs you in a way that is difficult to describe. To best way convey how great this album is would be to simply tell you that I was on the band’s website pre-ordering a vinyl copy by the time I’d reached track seven on my first listen through.
