Sighted earlier this year at the Camden Crawl and the Reading Festival, Cage the Elephant are one of those groups that tend to make a lasting impression. Led by the brothers Matt (singer) and Brad (guitarist) Shultz, the five-man band has left a trail of trashed bars, broken equipment and sore heads in their wake since arriving on these shores from their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Signed to a British label, they were resident for a while in East London, and have become the latest in a line of American acts to have enjoyed their first taste of serious success in the UK.

This sold-out gig at the 1,100-capacity Scala was their biggest yet, and the air was thick with spray from flying beer cans from the moment they arrived on stage. They began with a swampy, two-minute thrash called Voodoo that was mugged by an appalling sound mix. While stagehands swabbed the decks, Matt Shultz skittered hither and yon, chanting inaudibly into his microphone, shaking his peroxide bouffant and working through a repertoire of twitchy stage moves in the Iggy Pop tradition.

Around him the band pumped out a brand of punk-funk rock steeped in the cartoon lore invented by acts such as the MC5 and rhythmically overhauled by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In truth, the stage activity was rather tame compared with the pandemonium on the dancefloor, where gangs of rough boys slammed into one another at high speed.

The sound gradually improved as the group worked through a set mostly of songs from their self-titled debut album. Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked was a smart, bluesy number with a Beck influence, while In One Ear was a brilliant rap-and-roll mission statement with a lolloping rhythmic undercurrent that had a distinctly elephantine quality about it.

The songs were good and the performance inspired, but a substantial part of the audience had clearly come for a bout of anarchy on the dancefloor. Shultz did not let them down and as the band blasted through a frenetic finale of Free Love, he scaled the structure enclosing the mixing desk at the back of the hall and swallow-dived on to the heads below.

Tour continues: Sugarmill, Stoke-on-Trent, Nov 21; Empire, Middlesborough, Nov 22 2008

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