Let me set the scene. It's 2009 and Kings Of Leon are on stage at Reading festival and halfway through their set-list. They have been methodically strumming out a mix of songs from their last album Because Of The Times and year-old platinum baby: Only By The Night. Cruising through new material, the crowd noise still isn't really building up to anything spectacular. There's the core fans, crammed in at the front, in full voice... but they're always there and despite the enormous crowd behind them its hardly the festival reception the band had expected. They forget that this is Reading; 80% of the punters are too smashed and high to appreciate Caleb Followill's delicately rusty vocals or his cousin Mathew's intricate guitar pieces, they just want to shout the 6 to 10 words in a row that they can remember. Before he knows it, Caleb has gone through Be Somebody, Revelry and Crawl, all incredible new songs in their own right but the crowd are waiting for that song. And when he plays the opening riff and an almighty cheer goes up... well... Caleb loses his shit:
The highlight of that excruciating video is the crowd not even noticing the band deliberately butcher their favourite song and continuing to cheer, as I said: Reading. What it really shows, though, is a band frustrated by the success of one song (written half-jokingly) overshadowing their entire repertoire of material. They won't be having the same problems with this album: every song is fantastic. WALLS opens in true Kings Of Leon Fashion, the rumbling bass and soft, catchy guitar melody ease us in to leading single Waste A Moment, a memorable track that I'm sure will be eagerly awaited on any setlist. The Tennessean four-piece have always been adventurous, refusing to be constrained by a particular genre, always seeking to vary things up with each new release. This record is a great extension of that attitude. Each intro seems vastly different from the last, the jingly, up beat guitar of Around The World sounding like Franz-Ferdinand while they blend punchy Weezer-esque power chords with an intricate melody vaguely reminiscent of R.E.M. in Find Me.
At the same time, the quartet maintain that lyrical charm which characterises their material, demonstrating yet again that there's no harm in repeating a line if it sounds fucking great. I mean, I'm clueless as to what "Just like a reverend, like a reverend on the radio" means but they sing it so many times that you figure it must mean something deep. WALLS stands for We Are Like Love Songs so you'd guess that love is a major theme of the Followills' songwriting, but they address it in all manner of styles. Soft ballads are intermingled with stomping anthems, all of which are written from an almost retrospective outlook, older and wiser than on previous records.
You'd never guess they were an indie band.....
As a whole, the album (KOL's 7th) seems more clean-cut and expertly produced than anything they've released previously; every song seems to have been crafted to suit the group's stadium capacity crowds. Where their sound had, in the past, lacked a certain refined smoothness, WALLS is about as smooth as it gets. From the sleepy, melodic piano in Conversation Piece to the Spanishy guitar solo in Muchacho, everything is polished and intricately put together where previous records were a little bit rougher around the edges (intentionally more often than not). This in combination with some incredibly catchy chorus hooks makes the individual tracks far more memorable in their own right. They really do cover all the bases with this one and, if they can keep their cool when the tanked up crowds demand Sex On Fire, they really can put on an incredible show with the wealth of great songs they now have under their belts.
No comments:
Post a Comment