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It’s hard to determine when Kings of Leon stopped having fun. They were never the deepest band in the rock renaissance, but they were the ones who bought the most completely, dressing as the band of Almost known and live as an audition for one Behind the music special. Yet once they achieved their relentless stardom in the arena, the obligations of running a rock band as a major enterprise undermined any residual freedom and impulsiveness in their music. Their records have grown while the personalities behind them have shrunk. It’s been 10 years since Kings of Leon’s last song that anyone wants karaoke, and the band is still chasing the shadow of their mammoth hits from the late 2000s.
The group’s eighth album, When you see yourself briefly teases what a winning Kings of Leon album could look like in 2021. Surprisingly light on the toes, the debut album “When You See Yourself Are You Far” is brilliant with ringing polyrhythms. This is the most jubilant that the group has sounded in years, and while it is not their normal route, it suggests that there may be a route to go for shamelessly flying around the more perched, painted corners in the sky. contemporary alternative neon. This band is old beyond their years for so long, maybe it’s time they got young for once.
But When you see yourself is not that kind of album. It’s the only type of album Kings of Leon can’t do anymore, which is a minor variation of the last one and the one before. Most, if not the only novelty of this album, is that it is the first album in history available as NFT, a crypto way to sell art and music online. Forget the Southern Strokes or the Southern U2. They have now spent most of their careers as a Southern Post.Antics Interpol, a band that desperately clings to a sound that has stopped working, trying to write songs that skyrocket but are only capable of wallowing ones.
Lending to that unwanted sense of déjà vu comes back WALLS producer Markus Dravs, a disciple of Brian Eno who designed records for Coldplay and Arcade Fire. As a submission to the Grammy Awards For Your Consideration, her work is impeccable – almost every track sounds like an expensive technical feat. But in practice, his production rivals these songs more than it complements them, eclipsing them like skyscrapers oblivious to any lakeside views they might block. The mixture saves the worst of his anger for Caleb Followill, whose voice he continually finds new and cruel ways to bury. On “Fairytale,” Followill’s unloved howl is reduced to a stain of red wine trying to stand out on a busy carpet.
Followill was never an easily readable singer to begin with, but the lyrics that are audible put him in a dreary mid-forties rut. On the cosmically desperate “Time in Disguise,” one of many tracks on the tempo record of the mid-period Coldplay album, he can’t shake his own obsolescence: “Close your eyes and what do you see? / Is it a man or a masked machine? Even more dejected is the country-colored “Supermarket”, where Followill promises “I’m not going anywhere, if you have time.” Followill is 39 years old, but from those songs you’d think he was working on one of Rick Rubin’s end-of-life albums.
Does everyone want to hear from this band? While the early Kings of Leons albums left a lot to be done – namely the loathsome sex politics of the 1970s – they had a guy’s night energy that could be contagious if you bought into a particular fantasy notion of masculinity. When you see yourself, on the other hand, packs in all a weekend charity at The Container Store. It’s hard to imagine the first savage incarnation of Kings of Leon even wanting to listen to a band like this, let alone play in just one. In truth, their current iteration doesn’t seem very enthusiastic either.
Buy: Rough Trade
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