To say the Kings of Leon had a meteoric rise would be inaccurate.
Although their first three studio albums garnered the band much success outside the United States, allowing them to play to crowds of hundreds of thousands in Europe, these first efforts catered much more to the pallets of the critics than the retail consumers.
The Tennessee quartet's southern stripe, however, produced a twangy garage racket not ripe for American airplay. It wasn't until the band's 2009 sleeper hit Use Somebody exploded that the band went from across-the-pond prestige to American treasure.
To say that the Kings of Leon's collective ego has suffered meteoric growth since then would be spot on. After listeners absorb their newest effort, Come Around Sundown, this might even seem an understatement.
Since the MTV assisted success of Only By The Night, the Kings have done an excellent job of letting everyone know how cool they think they are. But there's no rule that says just because you're pompous doesn't mean you're wrong.
However, if Come Around Sundown is the Kings auditory defense and their attempt to show talent to back up the talk, then they face a rocky road ahead.
Although their ability to build an instrumental composition remains pretty strong, Kings of Leon spend majority of Sundown fueling this affectation with shallow lyrics and an unrelatable aesthetic.
The 13 tracks that compose the album are chock full of examples of this ego swelling, palpable pretension, but no better a paradigm is the lead single Radioactive. Albeit a tune that would make a perfect soundtrack for any retrospective Kodak or Hallmark commercial, the track barely touches the surface of home and childhood - its vague theme which even still must be assumed.
When the band isn't consumed with this nothing nostalgia, they spend the record recycling their normal rhetoric of drinking and partying, but do so in a much less interesting and less applicable way.
Those that will spend even the coldest days of the year sitting on a beach with a glass of tequila in hand might be able to conceptualize the aesthetic that the Kings are trying to convey, but the rest of us citizens of the real world won't be able to fathom these same feelings. Relating to this record would be tantamount to an act of escapism.
3 Culture
Andy Collier
review
Come Around
Sundown
Artist: Kings of Leon
Label: RCA Records
