KINGS OF LEON

ROYALTY PAINS

Kings of Leon strive to thrive again on Mechanical Bull

 

by Matt Ashare |  
Published October 9, 2013

It's a time honored and numbingly tired cliché in the annals of rock and roll. Eager young band bashes out a few tunes promising enough to spark the interest of a label or two, signs a big deal, and almost accidentally stumbles onto the fast-track to fame, where, like Odysseus sailing home from the Trojan War, they must navigate a series of treacherous challenges, posed in this case by the combined hazards of drink, drugs, dames, and dollars. Under the pressure to produce hits and move units without compromising whatever degree of artistic integrity the band might possess, egos expand, tempers flare, and someone does something stupid while partying on a yacht in the Mediterranean, which in turn leads to a meltdown on stage in Dallas, cancelled tour dates, murmurs of discontent, and a general sense that somehow it all went so terribly wrong.
    Okay, so those last couple of anecdotes — the yachting mishaps and the disaster in Dallas — are torn directly from the troubled pages of Kings of Leon. The Nashville-based retro-rocking foursome, who just released their sixth album in a decade, were embraced almost immediately (circa 2003) in England and Europe for their combination of gritty riffery and classic, tight-jeaned bad-boy posturing. It wasn't until 2008 that the band finally conquered the States, with a pair of polished singles from their Grammy-winning fourth album "Only By the Night." And that, as the story goes, is when the real problems began. Ah, the pains of rock royalty.
    It's not entirely clear just what went wrong, even after reading two full pages of copy about the epic saga Kings of Leon in the latest issue of "Rolling Stone," a story that poses the question, "Can rock's new underdogs battle back?" Apparently, there was some discord among the three siblings in the band — singer guitarist Caleb Followill, older brother Nathan (drums), and the younger Jared (bass) — and their cousin Matthew Followill, who handles the lead guitar duties, that may or may not have had to due with the relatively poor showing of "Come Around Sundown,"  a 2010 album that failed to match the multi-platinum, Grammy-capturing heights of "Only By the Night." There were anxieties about writing the next big single, about accusations that they'd sold out or "gone for the bucks" by, among others, Oasis' Liam Gallagher (like he's one to talk), and about Caleb's drinking, which came to a head when he stormed off stage in July of 2011, vowing to "vomit," "drink a beer," and "come back out and play three more songs." He did not return.
    Also, at some point in the mid-2000s, Nathan and Caleb apparently spent a lost New Year's weekend in New York consuming large amounts of cocaine. No arrests, hospitalizations, or stints in rehab were reported, although their mom was reportedly quite concerned, and there was some talk of an intervention.
    Given that the bar for bad behavior among rock and roll types has been set fairly high by at least a couple of other brother acts who come to mind — Oasis, the Black Crowes — not to mention plenty of other party-hearty bands without blood ties, Kings of Leon don't come across as having been alarmingly transgressive. More than anything, they simply appear to have been in dire of some time off, from touring, from recording, and most of all from one another. Think of it as an extended vacation, or a musical sabbatical of sorts after what admittedly had been a  pretty busy decade for the four of them. If nothing else, it probably a good opportunity to recharge the old batteries, to take stock of where they're headed as a band, and to at least attempt to rediscover the passion for playing that originally ignited the band. Nothing shocking there. 
    But, it's hard to deny the mythic pull of a good, old-fashioned rise, fall, and redemption story. VH1 has pretty much created an entire franchise around that premise with "Behind the Music," a rockumentary series now in its 15th year that seems more likely to run out of viewers before it runs out of subjects to exploit. And, so, "Mechanical Bull," the somewhat wryly titled new album by Kings of Leon, has been branded a "comeback" effort by "rock's new underdogs," a band so down on their luck that Caleb recently suffered yet another unfortunate yachting accident while the band were hitting golfballs into the sea during a toga party. That's right, he landed on his skinny behind, and he was so uncomfortable during the "Rolling Stone" interview that he was begging for pain pills.
    Pardon the sarcasm, but I'm finding it a little difficult to feel all that bad for the boys in Kings of Leon. And yet, it's hard to deny that they've found themselves at something of an artistic crossroads, caught somewhere between the raw, Southern-tinged garage-rock of their early days, and the burnished, somewhat Anglophiled, arena-ready moves they learned at the feet of U2, when they opened for the mighty Irish rock titans in 2005. You might even say that Kings of Leon were victims of circumstance, in the sense that they picked the wrong decade to clean up their sound for mass consumption — a decade that saw contemporaries like My Morning Jacket opting to downsize their commercial ambitions in favor of exploring challenging soundscapes, while comparatively modest underground rockers like the Arcade Fire and the Decembrists started charting in a major way.
    Fortunately, it's not too late for Kings of Leon to reestablish their bona fides, particularly here in the US, which has tended to be a secondary market for their wares. And, "Mechanized Bull" is a largely successful attempt to do so. At the very least, it finds the band feeling more or less at home with the variety of familiar styles they've settled on over the past decade, while Caleb sounds comfortably bummed about the day-to-day travails of just getting by, a mode he excels at. "I was walking through the desert/I was looking for drugs/And I was searching for a woman who was willing to love," he slurs with a kind of weary soulfulness, after some quick, down-and-dirty blues soloing in the slow-swinging "Rock City," an ode to the simple pleasures of solid riff and a sturdy backbeat.
    Later, amidst the jangle and hum of "Comeback Story," Caleb buys into the hard-luck mythos surrounding the band: "Picking up the pieces of the world that I know," he slurs urgently, "With one hand in the fire and the other in the snow/It's the comeback story of a lifetime/It's the comeback story of a lifetime." What resonate most is how desperately worn out he sounds. His is the voice of a guy who, for all the charged innuendo of the band's chart-topping 2008 single "Sex On Fire," mostly needs a hug, a hot meal, and maybe a good night's sleep.
    The tension between Caleb's laconic, almost fatigued delivery, and the generally upbeat melodic chime and churn of the band, is a big part of Kings of Leon's charm. In "Don't Matter," on of the disc's more straightforwardly driving rockers, Caleb affects Iggy Pop nonchalance as he tosses of a list of things that he doesn't care about — "I don't know where I'm gonna go/But it don't matter to me/You could bleed and stain my seat/But it don't matter to me" — before resigning himself, on a descending bridge, to the fact that "It's always the same, and I'm always the same." And that's a fair approximation of what holds the loosely jointed "Mechanical Bull" together: while the disc's moves from Southern accents, to retro-punk, to the Ryan Adams-style alt-country, romanti-pop of "Temple," to the yearning reflection of the Edge-y "Beautiful War," Caleb maintains his stance as a beautiful mess, a disheveled rocker who's seen a few things and is anxious move on to the next party. If "Mechanical Bull" is any indication, both he and the rest of Kings of Leon are actually doing just fine, plus or minus a yachting mishap or two.