Kings Of Leon And Me: A Troubled Relationship (Feature)
Monday, 08 November 2010
Written by Rhys Morgan
Remember that first time you popped ‘Youth & Young Manhood’ into your stereo? Wasn’t it totally badass? Weren’t Caleb’s vocals on ‘Molly’s Chamber’ inexplicitly dirty? There was no other band like them. They were the band that made me cool, more so at least than my Star Wars obsession and addiction to role-playing games ever could. When all my mates were listening to 50 Cent and Eminem, thinking that it was cool to listen to rappers sing about their bitch of a mother or their entourage ho’s, I was more than happy to have my favourite band be one which my mates had never heard of. And of course when that hardcore rumour of the band partaking in incest started to circulate, I, by affiliation, was also shagging every member of my family. I’d like to make it clear that I wasn’t and neither were the Tennessee foursome. ‘Youth & Young Manhood’ remains one of my favourite albums because it shaped me as a teenager, it gave me the badass streak that I so craved!
So then ‘Aha Shake Heartbreak’ was released and in my eyes Kings of Leon could do no wrong. It brought them slightly more into the public eye and a few privileged others at school started to take notice. I had people to appreciate this awesomeness with. Of course we thought we were the coolest people to walk the corridors of the school, even if our friends, who had now moved from rap and started to ‘indulge’ in Euro trance, still thought our tastes were shit. Even my mother seemed to agree with their delusional point of view. I remember putting ‘Four Kicks’ on a mixed CD for the car, and while I was losing my shit head banging and singing along I could tell she was ever so slightly disappointed with the shame I had engulfed her with. I loved that.
So there we were, me and my KoL gang, sitting in our sixth form common room eagerly waiting for the first play of the lead single from ‘Because of the Times’. We demanded silence! ‘On Call’ was different. It was mature. It was controlled. It was brilliant and stopped us all in our tracks. Then there was ‘Charmer’, oh the wailing of Caleb and Jared’s thumping bass kept this love affair on fire for the best part of five years. Oh and I can’t tell you how much ‘Knocked Up’ means to me, I honestly think it’s one of the best songs ever written. I would have been totally happy for them to call it a day, without a blemish on their card.
But no. ‘Did you hear Caleb’s having vocal lessons for the next album?’ a friend informed me. I knew something terrible was a foot. That voice was the biggest part of the sound. He conveyed emotion to me in a way that nobody else could. ‘Only By The Night’ ripped out my heart and took a steaming great turd on my corpse. Ok there were three great tracks, ‘Crawl’, ‘Be Somebody’ and ‘Cold Desert’. But that was it, it was soulless, the album managed to alienate old fans and make chavs collectively unite and say ‘yeah, rock music isn’t all shit!’ I don’t want my 12 year old sister to know the lyrics to KoL songs, least of all ‘Sex On Fire’. With that track KoL managed to piss me off in a way I didn’t think possible. Where had the subtlety gone? Go and listen to ‘Soft’, what a track, subtle but not cryptic and totally dirty. This whole album was so commercial; ‘Use Somebody’, ‘Revelry’ and ‘Notion’ were all, just, so wet! People saw the band as something new and fresh. They weren’t. They’d been mine for the last six years. That really got to me. They managed to become a band I just couldn’t bring myself to listen to anymore.
If ‘Only By The Night’ wasn’t bad enough, the Kings of Leon managed to deliver one more whopping great blow to my delicate area. Reading 2009. Oh dear. ‘How To Make Yourself Look Like Children In Front of 50,000 People’ by Caleb Followill et al. What the hell were they thinking? I stood there and screamed every word to every song. Then Caleb decides it’d be really rock ‘n’ roll to have a cry on stage and tell us ‘you fuckers are only here for two songs’. No actually, I fucking well wasn’t. I was here to go mental for a band I so respected, until those past 12 months of uncontrolled delusions of grandeur ensued.
By 2010 and the release of ‘Come Around Sundown’ I’d moved on, found other band’s that more than filled the void left in my life by the Kings of Leon and I had no major intention of purchasing the album. I did gave it a few spins on Spotify. But even by doing that I could feel resentment swelling inside me. Their top 5 songs on Spotify were all from the recent two albums. There are quite clearly songs on the album that were totally made for the cash prize of radio air time. But thankfully these ‘should-be’ hill-billies managed to reattach the scrotums and testicles long enough to write a few old school style tracks too. ‘The Face’ and ‘No Money’ have actually managed to re-kindle my flirtatious attraction with the music, the members, the mythos of Kings of Leon. I’ve gone back to each album in turn in the past few weeks and remembered why, deep down inside me, I do love them.
The Kings of Leon are back in my life, but they’re sleeping on the sofa from now on, their bedroom privileges have been revoked!
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But no. ‘Did you hear Caleb’s having vocal lessons for the next album?’ a friend informed me. I knew something terrible was a foot. That voice was the biggest part of the sound. He conveyed emotion to me in a way that nobody else could. ‘Only By The Night’ ripped out my heart and took a steaming great turd on my corpse. Ok there were three great tracks, ‘Crawl’, ‘Be Somebody’ and ‘Cold Desert’. But that was it, it was soulless, the album managed to alienate old fans and make chavs collectively unite and say ‘yeah, rock music isn’t all shit!’ I don’t want my 12 year old sister to know the lyrics to KoL songs, least of all ‘Sex On Fire’. With that track KoL managed to piss me off in a way I didn’t think possible. Where had the subtlety gone? Go and listen to ‘Soft’, what a track, subtle but not cryptic and totally dirty. This whole album was so commercial; ‘Use Somebody’, ‘Revelry’ and ‘Notion’ were all, just, so wet! People saw the band as something new and fresh. They weren’t. They’d been mine for the last six years. That really got to me. They managed to become a band I just couldn’t bring myself to listen to anymore.
