Send "Kings of Leon " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 If you had to single out a band as the embodiment of everything supposedly small-stakes and emotionally bankrupt about indie rock culture, who would it be? I imagine you wouldn't pick the almost painfully sincere and Billboard-topping Arcade Fire, but you're not Caleb Followill. Despite Only By the Night's elevating Kings of Leon from self-imagined superstars to actual superstars, Followill has spent the leadup to the release of Come Around Sundown in attack mode, throwing ill subliminals at Richard Reed Parry (the dude with the helmet), preemptively turning down Glee, and calling their breakout hit "Sex on Fire" a "piece of shit," the message being "look at these effin' hipsters, we're the real deal." Aw-shucks posturing aside, KoL have always been savvy about how they position themselves, and this is a classic political move: galvanizing a majority with a sense of victimhood.But after hearing Come Around Sundown, here's the thing about this "us vs. them" tactic: I don't believe it, in large part because I don't think Kings of Leon do either. Come Around Sundown indeed feels like an awfully political work of art, though it's not necessary falling into the philosophy of red state/blue state. Rather, Kings of Leon themselves come off like jaded and wearied political lifers who've finally realized what it takes to win the game they're playing: That compromise is an end, that saying nothing at all is often saying the right thing. Those sort of mixed messages permeate Come Around Sundown. The rise of Kings of Leon has coincided directly with their ability to be compared to U2, and just as you suspect they follow fame with a loose, modest comedown album pumped up to stadium status grandeur against its own will. At its core, first single "Radioactive" is a pleasingly aerodynamic piece of radio rock, a two-note bass riff giving an alley-oop to the most emphatic, hollering hook on Sundown. So why the gospel choir on the chorus? Well, that's just what the biggest of the big do, and the staggeringly exploitative video uncomfortably suggests the idea of it as soul-by-osmosis. Duly acknowledging the midnight tokers, "Mary" is full of headslap, "Sweet Leaf"-deep metaphors. Meanwhile, "Birthday" is a barstool rabble-rouser on first glance, but it's little more than an exhibit for what's become the stock characterization of women on Kings of Leon songs, namely, the kind of mythical, hell-raising maneater who still manages to make her submissive victim sound misognystic. Fact is, even if Kings of Leon sound almost nothing like the guys who made Youth & Young Manhood, they still have no trouble recognizing the archetypes that trigger an immense sense of self-satisfaction from people who insist rock was perfected in 1973. At the very least, the powerfully encoded titles of "Pickup Truck", "Beach Side", "Back Down South", and "Mi Amigo" aren't a real indication of what they deliver-- though there's the occasional pedal steel and fiddle sigh, Kings of Leon stop shy of the "we're a country band now" pandering that prolonged the careers of Bon Jovi, Kid Rock, Jewel, and Darius Rucker. But even if they did overemphasize their Tennessee twang, these songs in particular call out Come Around Sundown for lacking the lowest common denominator of all pop: hooks. Even if this still packs amphitheatres, what are the crowds suppose to sing along to? At this point, you should no doubt be used to Followill's bizarre accent, which sounds wholly averse to enunciation, but tonally, he remains one of the most grating singers in rock. Regardless of what incarnation of KoL you're talking about, the vocals should have depth, warmth, or swagger, but Followill lacks grit, instead gilded with a squeaky, mewling edge that is unwisely amplified by featuring him punishingly high in the mix at all times....full text |
| Nme |
| Nuke the fridge. Jump the shark. Hurdle the monkey. Whatever. There inevitably comes a moment in a huge band’s career where they lose their common touch and become slightly ridiculous. With Oasis it was Noel Gallagher visiting 10 Downing Street – then releasing ‘Be Here Now’ a few weeks later. With U2 it was splurging millions on an overblown feature-film, Rattle And Hum. And Kings Of Leon? They lost their cool the instant they unleashed the ‘Radioactive’ video. A monumentally misguided affair, it was shot in the style of a Center Parcs ad, and found the Followills frolicking with a phalanx of beaming black children. It felt enormously phony, and made many of us wonder if the band had genuinely gone a bit nuts. Then again: was it such a disaster? In a weird way, ‘Radioactive’ boded well for their fifth album, the follow-up to the eight-million-selling ‘Only By The Night’ – a record so successful it achieved the ultimate accolade: one of its songs was covered by Pixie Lott. After all, music is lacking in cartoonish personalities right now: we could do with a few space-cadet rock stars who’ve utterly blasted off from reality. After all, if KOL were capable of a flight of fancy like the ‘Radioactive’ video, perhaps their next album would be a grand, maximalist folly, laden with gongs, harps and male voice choirs. What price an avant-garde odyssey that consisted entirely of Caleb Followill whacking a slab of meat and barking into a flugelhorn? It’d be a talking point. But no. ‘Come Around Sundown’ is none of those things. It’s not a leftfield swerve. It’s a stately modern rock album that’s so desperate to prove its own authenticity it forgets to be remotely moving. This is music designed to be blasted from drive-time FM radios, and to waft around arenas big enough to have pigeons nesting (and shitting) in the echoing rafters. Sonically, it consolidates the band’s gradual shift from ramshackle charm to clean-lined grandeur. Guitars twinkle and shimmer, rather than scratch or chug. The album contains one indisputably great song: ‘Back Down South’, a beautifully subtle country-rock stomp that showcases Kings Of Leon’s knack for conjuring sonic drama from the simplest of ingredients: for the first two and a half minutes it’s just one bass note and one chord. That track, combined with the going-back-to-your-roots theme of ‘Radioactive’ (“It’s in the water, where you came from”), would suggest ‘Come Around Sundown’ is all about the band reconnecting with the Southern soil after the rootless hedonism explored on ‘Only By The Night’. Fine. That’s a good subject. Trouble is, they don’t see it through. Caleb Followill has admitted he ad-libbed the lyrics (“I free-floated everything”). In other words: he was on auto-pilot. The frontman always had a conflicted relationship with his own voice. On early albums he deliberately sang indistinctly to obscure the fact his lyrics didn’t mean anything. The point is: he overcame that on ‘Only By The Night’. Say what you like about ‘Sex On Fire’, it is at least about something: a transcendent one-night stand....full text |
| Guardian |
| The Comfort Dental Amphitheatre (Denver). The Jiffy Lube Live (Bristow, Virginia). When the Kings of Leon toured the US last summer, the names of the venues tickled the senses more than their vast interiors. Buy it from Buy the CD It was a lap of honour. Formed in Tennessee, but anointed as rock stars in the UK, the Kings had finally become successful in their homeland. Their Grammy-winning fourth album, Only by the Night, sold more than 2.5m copies worldwide and made Kings singer Caleb Followill famous in Nashville. Until then, the locals assumed the four Followills (three brothers and their cousin) were idle long-hairs or worse. "The cowboy's burning eyes/ Don't like the sight of me/ Just straight enough to breed," as Caleb puts it on "The Face", one of a smattering of southern-facing songs on the band's fifth effort. But thanks to Only by the Night, Caleb was famous enough in Tennessee to be targeted by burglars, an experience that informs the sense of dispossession in "The End", the album's opener. It's probably too pat to ascribe Come Around Sundown's gentle back-pedal from the huge success of its predecessor to some Tennessean burglars. But while Sundown sounds unmistakably like a Kings album, there are no meal tickets here, like "Sex on Fire" or "Use Somebody", the singles from Only by the Night. "Beachy" was the adjective the Kings used to describe their fifth. There is little of sand or sea here, though, save an intriguing dub echo on "The Immortals". In fact, Sundown's lead single, "Radioactive", boasts an urgent chorus that suggests the Kings have ditched their token indie crushes on the Pixies for Talking Heads. There are other incremental innovations here, too – a characteristic of each Kings album. "Mary" is a Sixties love song that packs the most barefaced rock guitar solo yet heard on a Kings record. For all their studied vastness, Kings of Leon have thus far managed to avoid many of the clichés required of American bands their size. You could argue that their success comes down to three factors – their boy band cohesiveness, the simplicity and spaciousness of their sound and the remarkable consistency of their form(ula). The Followills have successfully evolved jittery songs about partying into soul-searching music that alternates vagueness with specificity. "Pyro" is about an arsonist and "Back Down South" finds Caleb channelling his inner Skynryd....full text |
Kings of Leon lyrics Music videoclips
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