Matt Schultz, the charismatic 26-year-old front man for Cage The Elephant, is wandering the secular aisles of a Best Buy in his band's hometown of Bowling Green, Ky., looking for a copy of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, something he never would have been able to do as a kid.

First off, his recovering hippie father was a smash-your-Pearl-Jam-tape (some stories have it as Green Day) Pentecostal hard-ass. Secondly, Matt Schultz was dirt poor.

These are the easy, press kit angles every interviewer takes — to the point where Schultz must wonder what sorts of questions are asked of rock stars that don't grow up poor, hippie Christians.

"I think that all of our backgrounds play a huge role in our development," Schultz said. "We weren't allowed to listen to secular music as kids. I listened to gospel."

Schultz and his brother Brad wouldn't have been allowed to watch MTV even if their parents had been able to afford cable.

"When we would go over to our grandmother's trailer, we'd go to her bedroom and turn on MTV," Schultz says. "I remember watching ‘Heart Shaped Box.' It was so foreign to me. It was something I'd never been exposed to before."

This proves the aesthetic sincerity of last year's video for "Back Against the Wall." The randomly out-of-focus flannel shirts and bizarre, oversaturated sequences of Schultz burning gnomes at the stake instantly call to mind the grotesque imagery and garishness of trendsetting videos from the early ‘90s-like Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and, yes, Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box," but without any sense of irony — the videos and the music genuinely look and sound like they're from that era.

The idea that Schultz and Co. are a race of alt-rock Encino Men is furthered in an early review from Rolling Stone, which said the noble savages "rock so enthusiastically you wonder if the band thinks it's breaking new ground."

Currently, the band is working on its sophomore effort, scheduled to be released in September.

"Our musical tastes have changed, I think, individually and collectively as well," Schultz said. "I think with the first album ... we just wanted to make something that was a this-is-what-a-rock-album-is-supposed-to-sound-like' kind of thing ... but with this new record, I'm so pumped about it — dude, I've never been a part of anything as gratifying as this, musically speaking. What's it called... a life-changing experience."