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It doesn’t matter if it was made yesterday or 25 years ago, a good song is a good song.
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It doesn’t matter if it was made yesterday or 25 years ago, a good song is a good song.
Usually you come to a band all back to front. It’s not very often that you happen to hear a band’s first release and then follow their progression. Sometimes a band has already split, sometimes the ignorant bastards go and die on you before you even knew they were alive.
At the time of going to press, Kings of Leon are very much alive and together and I should think that they are feeling pretty pleased with themselves. Aha Shake Heartbreak is their second long-player and, showing true journalistic zeal, I haven’t knowingly heard a single track off their 2003 debut Youth and Young Manhood, but if this is that ‘dodgy’ second album I’ll bite your arm off for the first one.
“Slow Night, So Long” is a cracking opener, with a surprisingly British feel for 4 lads from the Southern U.S.. OK, so Caleb’s energetic, posturing, constipated vocals leave us in no doubt where he’s from but the awkwardly chiming, twanging guitars and melodic bass bring to mind New Order and any number of their generation. Maybe I’m too much of an old git, or perhaps I’m “too good to tango with the poor, poor boys”, but I don’t think much of the lyrics and yet I still find myself playing this track on repeat.
As if to prove my elderly gittyness, “King of the Rodeo” brings back the very smell of XTC’s wide-mouthed, syncopated spit “Cross Wires” from their 1978 album “White Music”. You’ll probably just have to take it from me that that’s a good smell.
“Pistol of Fire” is probably more like what I was expecting to hear. It has never been to Manchester and it’s never even heard of Swindon. This is low-down, snarling, southern Boogie that probably requires a visa to be played anywhere north of Chattanooga.
We all take a breather with “Milk”; a mellowed, acoustic feel. Caleb’s unintelligible verses add a little mystery and his voice is raw and beautiful. New single “Bucket” gets us going again with all the right ‘Umpteenth Wave of New Wave’ credentials and it doesn’t matter if it was made yesterday or 25 years ago, a good song is a good song.
Things tail off a little from here, “Soft” is poor, but then very few songs about knobs, whether flaccid or proudly standing to attention, have ever really done it for me and only “Razz” approaches the heights of the first half of the CD. “Four Kids” is probably fantastic live but they’ve shot their creative load by this stage and we’re just mopping up and looking for the fags.
I made the mistake of reading the lyrics, I suggest you don’t bother, but the lion’s share of Aha Shake Heartbreak is still a great listen. The Nobel Prize for Literature will not be inscribed with the name Followill this year, but the Nobel Prize for Four Members Of The Same Family Making A Pretty Bloody Good Record is in the bag.
Words : MONO