A band named after an act of animal cruelty makes its fourth appearance. We’re thrilled.
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[3.43]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Sticks so firmly to its tepid structure and instrumentation that the idea of this band “letting go” of anything seems overly ambitious.
[2]
Alfred Soto: To let go of what — this coiled, echo-prone early ’10s production?
[3]
Iris Xie: I was all ready to embrace my inner dive bar hipster with the intro with the drums and low backbeat, until the plodding vocals came in. The chorus melody is unpleasant and has a curious quality of lacking a relaxed rhythm that makes use of the instrumental’s groove, resulting in an effect of listening to styrofoam rub against sandpaper. For the chorus, the end of each line seems to end on the top of the next line, resulting in a clenched sensation that feels like you are holding your breath for a competition, and then forgotten halfway through by a self-absorbed facilitator, who you give a side-eye to while you gasp for air. It seems extremely antithetical to its message, but also interesting because if intentional, it provides a subtext that betrays the actual feelings of the singer. Still, I feel pretty stressed listening to this repression – I truly don’t think the protagonist of “Ready to Let Go” is actually ready to let go.
[4]
Ian Mathers: I can’t be sure I’ve never heard these guys before, they’re one of many modern rock….ish? bands with crappy names and sounds that are less generic than almost denatured. Sure, I have no association in my mind with their name other than a faint general negative one, but they probably had some hit that I didn’t recognize when I looked up their discography but would make me wince in recognition if you played it. I’m not going to seek whatever that was out, because this is just as gormless as I would have guessed sound unheard.
[3]
Josh Love: It’s kind of amazing that I’ve been hearing the name of this band for a solid decade now and still couldn’t hum one of their songs. In fact, I perpetually get them mixed up with the superior Foster the People, who I know had at least one really good tune. I also just realized the band’s initials are CTE, which is appropriate since you probably have to be suffering from concussion-induced symptoms to get excited about “Ready to Let Go.” I also know CTE is touring with Beck and Spoon this summer; I’m fairly interested in buying a ticket just to see those latter two acts (albeit Beck mainly for the nostalgia), and it’s an outright travesty that these dudes are getting billed above Spoon, who are still proving you can make great rock music that isn’t necessarily sonically progressive through a mastery of groove and an emphasis on tension and release.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: The surest sign we are living in a glitchy-ass, godforsaken parallel timeline is that Cage the Elephant has been a fairly big rock band for over a decade but has virtually zero cultural pull. It’s as if they score another hit — a genuine hit, if not “Thank U, Next” then at least Weezer’s “Africa” level of zeitgeist — the universe’s elephant will become uncaged, as it were, everything will unravel, and the world will revert to (opens Google News, where Michael Cohen is quoted saying “over 9,000”) not this. I’m giving an extra point just for that.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: I’m not sure why this song vaguely nauseates and irritates me, because listening to the verses, they’re perfectly tuneful and pleasant. The chorus is not so much bad but predictable and the mood at the end is not one of release, but just that it ended because… reasons? I will give it credit for being only three minutes long and I won’t run out of any venue I happen to hear it in, but that’s about it. The score would be lower but I’m hedging in case I find myself singing it in the shower tomorrow.
[5]