Kings of Leon Only by the Night June 24, 2009
By Christopher Copeland
click here to flip the page
g
O
ther than fleeting glances in headlines, most of what I had heard about Kings of Leon was ambivalent, or at least it caused me to be ambivalent. The first substantial report I heard about the Kings came via a friend who saw them live and reported back that they melted his face off.
Page 2 of 9
Another friend in the Nashville music biz (which is, at least in the grand narrative being constructed about them, home to the Kings) thought they were pricks. I don’t know if he’d met them or not, but that speaks of, at the very least, a severe distaste of the music. My brother reserved for them the same kind of malice he once saved for boy bands I heard the music sounded sonically spacious. I heard the music sounded garage grunge (not compatible with sonically spacious if you’re keeping tabs). They looked liked The Strokes, they toured with U2, they quickly earned the plaudits (gushings?) of Rolling Stone,
none of which are textbook methods for building street cred. They seemed like rock and roll’s answer to Gossip Girl: The only way to like them was ironically, and ironic fetishes are becoming clichéd. Last autumn however Kings of Leon released Only By the Night. The people I knew who loved them loved them more, but the tell-tale reaction came from the people who had hated them. It seemed like a collective tucking of the tails behind the legs, sheepish admissions that the new Kings record was really good. My Nashville friend highly complimented a song by “this new band” his friend asked him to lisPage 3 of 9
ten to; thus tricked into submission, he discovered that even pricks can make great music. Then, my brother, with no trace of irony, gave me the new record for Christmas; at the dirty riff of “Crawl,” I was sold. I come to Kings of Leon with no prior knowledge. For all I know the brothers (and cousin) Followill have completely sold out some “original sound” or vibe or image that came along with the other records. While I intend to find out if this is so, I don’t really care if they did nor not. Nor does it bother me in the least that the sound they embody now has been completely lifted from other influences (most notably U2). The riff from “Crawl” is pure Achtung Baby-era
Edge, just as he was discovering his fuzz petals. Likewise, the intro to “Use Somebody,” with the ringing guitars and choir-like vocals might have been scrapped from the floors of a Dublin studio after the Atomic Bomb sessions. The Edge, circa 1987, used effects to render the simplicity of three notes sonically spacious; Matthew Followill circa 2008 does the same on “Manhattan.” Yet the Kings differentiate themselves from U2 in one manner: the chorus bass riffs on “Manhattan” as well as “Be Somebody” are more busy than Adam Clayton ever cared to get, they are simple, lively, and they carry both tunes. Kings of Leon also manage to sound like The Strokes albeit less broody. The tandem Page 4 of 9
“Yes, the Kings have stolen, but the theft has been accomplished with grace” guitar parts are less than intricate and meld together in a way that masks a lack of shredding talent, but didn’t The Strokes remind us that shredding talent is not the heart of rock and roll (as if we couldn’t have learned that lesson much earlier from C.C. DeVille)? Perhaps the influence of The Strokes comes across most forcefully in image: The Kings write short, simple, rock songs. They wear old t-shirts and fail to shave. They appear nonplussed in live performances. If The Strokes saved rock and roll in 2001, then Kings of Leon are the beatif-
ic vision of that salvation. There is also the matter of The Rolling Stones and James Brown. Keith Richards could play two simple chords with the hubris to believe (and be correct in doing so) that those two chords carried the song; that sentiment is palpable underneath the fuzz of “Crawl” and sneaks into “Sex on Fire,” the first single. Caleb Followill has the chops to scream like the godfather of soul on “Manhattan” and “Notion,” and unlike Dave Matthews or Chris Martin (who wears his falsetto like a mask) one doesn’t feel Page 5 of 9
that Caleb is toying with the limits of his range; he simply sounds like he has soul. And speaking of Chris Martin, several cuts from Only by the Night feel like Coldplay when they were trying hard not to be Radiohead and ended up sounding like U2 instead, which brings the listener back to square one. Yes, the Kings have stolen, but the theft has been accomplished with such grace, such force that we stand and applaud and believe the purloined object belonged to them all along. Kings of Leon are the most
transparently derivative band that somehow sound only like themselves. Not that the Kings lack any originality. Caleb’s voice has such a distinct texture it becomes a sleight of hand, something we pay attention to while so many other musical influences are digested and reproduced right under our noses. For every sound like U2, there is a sound that is nothing like U2, from the industrial eeriness of “Closer” to the synth riff near the end of “I Want You” that sounds like something from the Brooklyn experimental music scene. The Kings deft-
“They seemed like rock and roll’s answer to Gossip Girl” Page 6 of 9
ly employ that synth for a mere 8 bars: just enough to shift the listener slightly but not enough to define the song. For every Richardsesque riff there is a guitar sound like the bridge of “Be Somebody” that eschews all sense of the blues. The most original aspect of Only by the Night however is the lyrics, which teeter on the edge of melodrama before gaining an earnest and sometimes penetrating equilibrium. A song that begins, “I like to dance all night” forebodes either the newest teen-pop phenom or Lionel Richie. Yet in “Manhattan,” Caleb blends romantic images of sipping wine and kissing stars with the dour naturalism of hunting and skinning hides. The
song probes the conflicting aspects of the American Dream, musing on freewheeling city nightlife and the cost of that freedom— “Every drop that spills on every plot of ground, it’s all for you for what you found.” “Closer,” sung from a vampire’s perspective avoids banality by relegating the vampiric aspects of the narrator’s experience to casual references--”2000 years of chasing’s taking its toll”-while emphasizing more human aspects like the lack of mercy often shown in fulfilling desire. “17” begins with a clichéd musing about a too-young girl but veers into genuine sympathy rather than a Kip Winger-ish desire to deflower. While “Cold Desert” offers a high school freshman an Page 7 of 9
easy symbol to decode, the emotionally locked down male is rendered in an original way: “I never cried when I was feeling down; I’ve always been scared of the sound.” The ultimate skill in Caleb’s lyrics however is that he endows them with a poet’s flourishes, weaving imagery, alliteration, rhyme and metaphor like a writer; not a singer or a rocker or an angsty teen who writes poems in a beat up journal, but a writer. If the content becomes sophomoric at points, these poetic elements certainly mitigate it, and the underlying music propping up this lyrical dexterity relieves the listener of any need for ironic adoration. Ultimately, Kings of Leon
have one fantastic album, and I suspect that the back catalog is pretty strong as well. Perhaps the thing they stole from U2 that has contributed most to their success is the wherewithal to stick with the same producer (Angelo Petraglia) who, much like Daniel Lanois did for U2, helps them mature rather than rest on old successes. Let’s just hope that their evolution doesn’t involve a two-album detour from this method. p
Page 8 of 9
Page 9 of 9