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Other than fleeting glances in headlines, most of what I had heard about Kings of Leon was ambivalent, or at least it caused me to be ambivalent. The first substantial report I heard about the Kings came via a friend who saw

them live and reported back that they melted his face off. Another friend in the Nashville music biz (which is, at least in

the grand narrative being constructed about them, home to the Kings) thought they were pricks. I don’t know if he’d met

them or not, but that speaks of, at the very least, a severe distaste of the music. My brother reserved for them the same

kind of malice he once saved for boy bands

I heard the music sounded sonically spacious. I heard the music sounded ga-

rage grunge (not compatible with sonically spacious if you’re keeping tabs). They

looked liked The Strokes, they toured with U2, they quickly earned the plaudits (gushings?)

of Rolling Stone, none of which are textbook methods for building street cred. They seemed

like rock and roll’s answer to Gossip Girl: The only way to like them was ironically, and

ironic fetishes are becoming clichéd.

Last autumn however Kings of Leon released Only By the Night. The people

I knew who loved them loved them more, but the tell-tale reaction came from

the people who had hated them. It seemed like a collective tucking of the tails

behind the legs, sheepish admissions that the new Kings record was really

Other than fleeting glances in headlines, most of what I had heard about Kings of Leon was ambivalent, or at least it caused me to be ambivalent. The first substantial report I heard about the Kings came via a friend who saw

them live and reported back that they melted his face off. Another friend in the Nashville music biz (which is, at least in

the grand narrative being constructed about them, home to the Kings) thought they were pricks. I don’t know if he’d met

them or not, but that speaks of, at the very least, a severe distaste of the music. My brother reserved for them the same

kind of malice he once saved for boy bands

I heard the music sounded sonically spacious. I heard the music sounded ga-

rage grunge (not compatible with sonically spacious if you’re keeping tabs). They

looked liked The Strokes, they toured with U2, they quickly earned the plaudits (gushings?)

of Rolling Stone, none of which are textbook methods for building street cred. They seemed

like rock and roll’s answer to Gossip Girl: The only way to like them was ironically, and

ironic fetishes are becoming clichéd.

Last autumn however Kings of Leon released Only By the Night. The people

I knew who loved them loved them more, but the tell-tale reaction came from

the people who had hated them. It seemed like a collective tucking of the tails

behind the legs, sheepish admissions that the new Kings record was really

Kingsof LeonOnly by the Night

By Chris Copeland

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good. My Nashville friend highly complimented a song by

“this new band” his friend asked him to listen to; thus

tricked into submission, he discovered that even pricks

can make great music. Then, my brother, with no trace of

irony, gave me the new record for Christmas; at the dirty

riff of “Crawl,” I was sold.

I come to Kings of Leon with no pri-or knowledge. For all I know the brothers (and

cousin) Followill have completely sold out some “original

sound” or vibe or image that came along with the other

records. While I intend to find out if this is so, I don’t re-

ally care if they did nor not. Nor does it bother me in the

least that the sound they embody now has been completely

lifted from other influences (most notably U2).

The riff from “Crawl” is pure Achtung Baby-era Edge,

just as he was discovering his fuzz petals. Likewise, the

intro to “Use Somebody,” with the ringing guitars and

choir-like vocals might have been scrapped from the floors

of a Dublin studio after the Atomic Bomb sessions. The

Edge, circa 1987, used effects to render the simplicity of

three notes sonically spacious; Matthew Followill circa

2008 does the same on “Manhattan.” Yet the Kings differ-

“Yes, the Kings have stolen, but the theft has been

accomplished with grace”

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entiate themselves from U2 in one

manner: the chorus bass riffs on

“Manhattan” as well as “Be Some-

body” are more busy than Adam

Clayton ever cared to get, they are

simple, lively, and they carry both

tunes.

Kings of Leon also manage to

sound like The Strokes albeit less

broody. The tandem guitar parts

are less than intricate and meld to-

gether in a way that masks a lack

of shredding talent, but didn’t The

Strokes remind us that shredding

talent is not the heart of rock and

roll (as if we couldn’t have learned

that lesson much earlier from C.C.

DeVille)? Perhaps the influ-

ence of The Strokes comes

across most forcefully in im-

age: The Kings write short,

simple, rock songs. They wear

old t-shirts and fail to shave.

They appear nonplussed in live

performances. If The Strokes

saved rock and roll in 2001, then

Kings of Leon are the beatific vi-

sion of that salvation.

There is also the matter of The Roll-ing Stones and James Brown. Keith Richards could

play two simple chords with the

hubris to believe (and be correct

in doing so) that those two chords

carried the song; that sentiment

is palpable underneath the fuzz

of “Crawl” and sneaks into “Sex

on Fire,” the first single. Caleb

“Yes, the Kings have stolen, but the theft has been

accomplished with grace”

of 9

Followill has the chops to scream

like the godfather of soul on “Man-

hattan” and “Notion,” and unlike

Dave Matthews or Chris Mar-

tin (who wears his falsetto like a

mask) one doesn’t feel that Caleb

is toying with the limits of his

range; he simply sounds like he

has soul. And speaking of Chris

Martin, several cuts from Only by

the Night feel like Coldplay when

they were trying hard not to be

Radiohead and ended up sounding

like U2 instead, which brings the

listener back to square one.

Yes, the Kings have stolen, but

the theft has been accomplished

with such grace, such force that

we stand and applaud and believe

the purloined object belonged to

them all along. Kings of Leon are

the most transparently derivative

band that somehow sound only

like themselves.

Not that the Kings lack any

originality. Caleb’s voice has such

a distinct texture it becomes a

sleight of hand, some-

thing we pay attention

to while so many other

musical influences are

digested and reproduced

right under our noses.

For every sound like U2, there is a

sound that is nothing like U2, from

the industrial eeriness of “Closer”

to the synth riff near the end of “I

Want You” that sounds like some-

“They seemed like rock and roll’s answer to Gossip Girl”

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thing from the Brooklyn experimental music scene. The

Kings deftly employ that synth for a mere 8 bars: just

enough to shift the listener slightly but not enough to de-

fine the song. For every Richards-esque riff there is a gui-

tar sound like the bridge of “Be Somebody” that eschews

all sense of the blues.

The most original aspect of Only by the Night however is the lyrics, which

teeter on the edge of melodrama before gaining an ear-

nest and sometimes penetrating equilibrium. A song that

begins, “I like to dance all night” forebodes either the new-

est teen-pop phenom or Lionel Richie. Yet in “Manhat-

tan,” Caleb blends romantic images of sipping wine and

kissing stars with the dour naturalism of hunting and

skinning hides. The song probes the conflicting aspects of

the American Dream, musing on freewheeling city night-

life and the cost of that freedom—“Every drop that spills on

every plot of ground, it’s all for you for what you found.”

“Closer,” sung from a vampire’s perspective avoids ba-

nality by relegating the vampiric aspects of the narrator’s

experience to casual references--”2000 years of chasing’s

taking its toll”--while emphasizing more human aspects

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like the lack of mercy often shown

in fulfilling desire. “17” begins

with a clichéd musing about a

too-young girl but veers into genu-

ine sympathy rather than a Kip

Winger-ish desire to deflower.

While “Cold Desert” offers a high

school freshman an easy symbol

to decode, the emotionally locked

down male is rendered in an origi-

nal way: “I never cried when I was

feeling down; I’ve always been

scared of the sound.”

The ultimate skill in Caleb’s

lyrics however is that he endows

them with a poet’s flourishes,

weaving imagery, alliteration,

rhyme and metaphor like a writ-

er; not a singer or a rocker or an

angsty teen who writes poems in

a beat up journal, but a writer. If

the content becomes sophomoric at

points, these poetic elements cer-

tainly mitigate it, and the under-

lying music propping up this lyri-

cal dexterity relieves the listener

of any need for ironic adoration.

Ultimately, Kings of Leon have one fan-tastic album, and I suspect

that the back catalog is pretty

strong as well. Perhaps the thing

they stole from U2 that has con-

tributed most to their success is

the wherewithal to stick with the

same producer (Angelo Petraglia)

who, much like Daniel Lanois

did for U2, helps them mature

rather than rest on old success-

es. Let’s just hope that their evo-

lution doesn’t involve a two-album

detour from this method.

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