They’d have you believe they’re the next U2 poised to change the world with the power of their craft, but they’re really more like the Darkness moved to Tennessee and started letting their label cut their hair and dress them. What’s more, there are only two ways it can be taken and one of them is the clap. Caleb explained the chorus of the newest “Fire” song in a promotional YouTube home video where he said, “you know, the lyric can be taken any way and there’ll be people that say it’s corny or whatever, but, you know, if you’ve ever had really good sex, I don’t think it’s corny.” Maybe not corny, per se, but it is undeniably trite, petty, cliché, and counterintuitive to their image as serious musicians. The lyrics (which include the limerick like chorus “You, your sex is on fire / And so were the words to transpire”) are consistently juvenile, insincere, plain, and occasionally imbecilic. It’s given the illusion of substance by a few infrequent bars of the very same staccato stabs re-popularized by the Strokes at the turn of the millennium and traced back to the likes of Television.
The track begins on an alternating two-note rhythm guitar riff that never ventures out of its safety zone. Perhaps sensing the half-baked nature of the meaningless tune, they decided the nod would instead go to the deeply emotional “Sex on Fire”, a predictable tale of tail conquered.įrom the band that brought you the repetitious penis ode “Pistol of Fire” in 2004 comes the equally obvious panty tosser “Sex on Fire”. That track falls squarely in the latter category since some of the words have mildly political connotations bordering on Toby Keith style über patriotism, but they stop a few blocks short of actually saying anything due to their jumbled execution. The lead single was originally supposed to be “Crawl”. They write self-aggrandizing ditties about encounters with groupies, boastful yarns about how real they are, and vaguely worded nonsensical ramblings punctuated by choruses picked out of a rhyming dictionary. Now, they have only ever had three songs on every album. With Only by the Night and whisperings of “the night time is the right time” dancing in their heads, the Kings of Leon have finally wholeheartedly embraced their inner Strokes and outer U2 (minus the relevant politics) and channeled the ensuing derivative drivel directly through the most radio friendly Nickelback form. Over the next two albums, they did their best to get away from it by stretching their meager talents and pussy driven ambitions over sounds borrowed from U2, with whom they had also toured. However, despite earning the manly man merit badges they started making music for in the first place on the back of so many generous comparisons, they never truly embraced the Southern Strokes tag that hounded their early work. Shortly thereafter, three of the four Followill boys lost their virginity. Youth and Young Manhood (2003) launched their major label buzz factory with a posture heavy mix of the Strokes and stolen Southern rock aesthetics.
With the highly anticipated fourth Kings of Leon album, this quartet of Tennessee good old boys have finally created the album they were always destined to make. Lucky for us, Only by the Night is the CD that will turn the tide on that cesspool.
Yet the many devoted street teams and pocketed critics always seem to drown out the few authorities willing to put the effort in to point out how average they truly are. They exist on and believe in their own hype, an intangible juggernaut stunningly and consistently supported by the UK and Australian media while soundly denounced by the North American bastion of indie taste Pitchfork, now for the fourth time in as many full-lengths with their lowest ever rating. The brothers and cousin Followill are now in the bottom rung of the pecking order, no different from all the other Limp Bizkit and Avril Lavigne commodities that attempt to pass off the most expensive gear and shallow, materialistic existences as creative substance, except for the fact the Kings of Leon sincerely believe they are real artists. These fakes come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and intensities. No one in or around it has any illusions to the contrary. The music business is a land of phonies and charlatans. Sarah “Lipstick on a Pitbull” Palin, a vocal supporter of abstinence-only sex education “I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better.” “We try to be as real as we possibly can, because you can only put on a charade for so long before you start acting a double-charade.