Something I'd Like To See #294: A Return To Form

These guys are not cool. I mean, by all objective accounts, this is just incredibly lame. Like really, really awful. I have actually seen Christian pop bands look tougher than this.

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I still remember how awesome Youth & Young Manhood sounded the first time I heard it. Jangling guitars, a slight country twang, and some truly bizarre lyrics all mixed to make the Kings of Leon sound unique in indie rock. If you recall, the scene was already dominated by a hip young band from New York, and in fact, I can remember plenty of reviews that described the Kings as “Southern-fried Strokes.” The comparisons were appropriate. For one thing, the Kings had the same penchant for very tight guitar arrangements, and the styles of the two bands were also similar. But the Kings were different. Even their stomping grounds provided a stark contrast to bands like The Strokes or The Hives. Nashville, Tennessee is popular as a music hotspot, but the only time its fashion has seriously appeared in NYC has been in the impromptu gigs of the inimitable Naked Cowboy.

I've heard many rumors that the first Kings album isn't actually their own work, that it's written by a third party and performed by the band, Monkees-style, to create a very intentional indie “product.” I've always shrugged off this assertion for many reasons. For one thing, even indie music is a product, and the hippest bands simply make their musical creations more “authentic” or “legitimate.” This idea, though, that even my favorite artists could be less “real” than I have found them to be, has been a struggle for me to wrap my head around. But the easiest way past this rabbit hole criss-cross of entertainment and philosophy has always been the music itself. If it sounds good, it doesn't matter how “real” it is. It's aesthetic value is real to me. As far as the Kings were concerned, their debut album sounded great, and as far as I was concerned, that was all that was important.

However, when the second album arrived -- the hipper Aha Shake Heartbreak -- the Kings formula started to change. After touring with The Strokes, the influence was even more noticeable than before, and the things that made the two bands similar in the first place -- the tight guitar solos, the shorter “poppy” songs -- were amplified with clearer production and cleaner performances. For all the changes, though, Aha Shake Heartbreak was still a great album to listen to, and it still sounded like the Kings, albeit a 2.0 version.

But this chameleon-like change was not a step in the Kings evolution, it was the beginning of a very different process. The Kings were becoming a completely different band. As much as I liked Heartbreak, I couldn't get past how silly the band looked in their fashion photos in the CD inlay. When I saw them live that year, too, it was remarkable how uninterested and even bored they looked on stage. The Strokes had tried the same act when I saw them that same year, but where The Strokes could pull of the indie hip thing quite well, the Kings just looked lazy. Needless to say, it was a disappointing show.

Still, it was not even close to the disappointment that was their next album, the difficult to pinpoint Because Of The Times. Apparently, like some musical equivalent of Absorbing-Man, they had sucked up the darker, grimier sounds of their new tour partners, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and created an album that tried to add the shoegazing tendencies and aggressiveness of BRMC. As you might expect, these new sounds don't fit so well with country twang and New York punk, and the album was understandably a confusing mess. A few good songs, to be sure, but still a mess. Their latest album only makes the results of this adaptive musical strategy into some sort of hilarious joke. On Only By The Night, the band adopted the U2 sound (yes, U2), and emerged as a caricature of themselves. But the best part of this joke -- the truly funny part -- is that the people actually in the band seem to be the only ones who don't get it. (One of the singles from that album is “Sex On Fire,” which would be less funny but more respectable if it was in fact about a painful STD. The video is one of the funniest things I've seen all year, which is a huge statement because I just watched The Room and have Troll 2 in the queue.)

Judging by sales, you could argue I'm totally wrong. Only By The Night is the most popular Kings album yet. But the sad fact is that there are a hundred bands who go for that stadium-filling U2 sound, and a good chunk of them do it much better than the Kings do. Coldplay, British Sea Power, and Longwave come to mind. Heck, even the country-tinged stadium-like sound is already done much better by the likes of Band Of Horses. Does the world really need another bland, mindless, and overly ambitious indie band like The Killers? I liked the Kings albums -- no, I loved them -- when they were unique, when they sounded like something only the Kings could put out.

I had a dream once, embarrassing and music-obsessed as it may sound, to hear the Kings of Leon do something live that only they could pull off. Creedence Clearwater Revival has always been one of my favorite bands, and they share some surprising similarities to the Kings. CCR was never truly country (impossible when you start in sunny California), and their style, like the Kings' decades later, was a creation that only partially reflected their roots. But like CCR, Kings did something with their first two albums that other bands in their day could not. They sounded great while sounding like themselves. My dream was to see these two bands unite in the form of a perfectly selected cover. I wanted to see the Kings play “Commotion” by CCR. They would have been perfect for it, and it would have made for a great show. I cannot imagine them doing that today, but I can imagine them playing awful covers of U2 songs or BRMC songs or even Strokes songs.

What I would like to see is a good band return to form. I would like to see the Kings go back to playing music that is theirs, both a nod to the past and something new. I doubt that day will come (or return), and until that does, I'll have to be satisfied with those first two albums. But seriously, Youth & Young Manhood is fantastic, a solid record from first song to hidden track. What happened to these guys?