Kings of Leon 'Come Around Sundown'
posted in: Music News • Reviews & Playlists • Rock
Evolution can be a very languorous process. Except when it comes to Kings of Leon.
The band’s fifth studio album hit stores Tuesday, coming off the heels of their smash Only By The Night, which debuted in the Top 5 on the Billboard charts in 2008 and catapulted the band to official rock star status. The singles Sex on Fire and Use Somebody only further enhanced Caleb Followill’s, the band’s poster boy, reputation as a lothario, prone to wild flirtations with the shadier side of life.
But that was then. Darwin’s theory has taken hold and Come Around Sundown represents a new Kings of Leon.
Take The End, the track that (ironically) sets the record in motion. As frontman Followill explains, It sort of comes in one piece at a time, that’s always a good way, it sort of layers itself, to start a record.
That faintly apoplectic track creeps up quietly. Yet soon enough, the song becomes a choke hold that pushes listeners on to a musical tilt-a-whirl that while at times is vertiginous, never strays too far from the band’s real gimmick: the ability to take straight up chords, catchy, comfortable beats and familiar, radio-blasting rock, filter it through their Tennessee sieve”and quickly emerge with something totally unexpected.
It doesn’t always work. The thing is, what makes Come Around Sundown nearly impossible not to listen to, is that more often than not it does.
The End doesn’t end by throwing itself off into an abyss; rather it actually finishes with a smile on its face. It’s almost as if the track is setting up listeners for what’s to come, much of it faintly reminiscent of artists from the ˜70s (think Steve Perry or Don Henley), who knew how to make people love a song, connect them to a specific point in time in their lives.
That quality makes for some of the more transcendent tracks. No Money, Beachside and Birthday, all are songs that recall sultry summer days, an aimless cruise around town with a pack of friends in the car, windows open, radio blasting. And Back Down South, a nod to Nashville and the band’s Franklin, Tennessee home, is a southern spin on a Springsteen anthem if ever there was one.
But the Followills can’t seem to simply let go and let the day take them away.
Mary, a track Caleb recalls as something I was writing while drunk in my house, plays as such. The song is there, but the band can’t seem to exactly find it and consequently, restraint is lost. The electric guitar and the song take a battle of the bands turn and things get a little out of hand.
Still, it’s hard not to listen”and be forgiving.
Laying down the Mary track, which was written at the beginning of Only By The Night and the Sex on Fire single craze that followed, show the band is comfortable in its skin, more than ready to embrace its own historic rock ˜n’ roll evolution.
Kings of Leon
Come Around Sundown (RCA)
Track list:
1. The End
2. Radioactive
3. Pyro
4. Mary
5. The Face
6. The Immortals
7. Back Down South
8. Beach Side
9. No Money
10. Pony Up
11. Birthday
12. Mi Amigo
13. Pickup Truck
Neal Webster Turnage is a Los Angeles writer whose work appears frequently in many national and international consumer magazines.