Kings of Leon Come Around Sundown (Columbia)
1/5
By: Theo Krekis
I remember vividly how painful it was for me to hear a nine year old boy shout “have you heard ‘Kings of Leon’ by Sex On Fire?” to his friend on the bus. Completely irrationally, I felt like spinning round in my chair and screaming my lungs out at this child who could hardly even tie a knot in his school tie. Instead, I sat there, and bit my lip. But similar little things have angered me so often recently that I feel I have to vent a little.
Despite the cover to Come Around Sundown resembling a postcard so un-offensively bland I’d happily send it to my parents to ease their fears about the raucous kind of holiday I was actually having, I did my best to sit down to listen to it with my ears open, ears without prejudice, without preconceptions. However hard this was becoming, they were once my band.
As I listened through, gazing occasionally at the cheap postcard-like cover, I hoped the songs wouldn’t sound as bad as their titles suggested they might. ‘Mi Amigo’. ‘The Immortals’. ‘Pony Up’. Unfortunately, they sure did. It soon became clear that any of the promise that echoed through every beat of Youth And Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak was by now well and truly absent. All that remained was the dregs of a band clearly running out of steam, a group traipsing along, dragging their heels, exhausted, desperate for an injection of creative flair.
Come Around Sundown opens with ‘The End’, a number characterised by Caleb Followill’s musings upon some lengthy process beginning to wind down. Ominous? Perhaps. But it least it provokes thought, and has a substance that the rest of the record really lacks. The creative assuredness that once separated them from the pool of other rock and roll bands is now something of which they are devoid. Gone are the raw riffs, the screeching about erectile dysfunction as a result of consuming too many narcotics (see ‘Soft’), the solos that made the hairs on my arms give a standing ovation. The songs that make up their latest number one (number one!) album rely instead heavily on Caleb’s vocal capabilities, yet it soon becomes clear that with the band behind him not on form, his growl is not enough to cut it on its own.
Unlike Youth and Young Man Hood where each track could have been released as a single, Come Around Sundown feels like a record of b-sides. Goodbye, Kings.
Artists in this article: Kings Of Leon
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