:: Track Listing

1. Knocked Up
2. Charmer
3. On Call
4. McFearless
5. Black Thumbnail
6. My Party
7. True Love Way
8. Ragoo
9. Fans
10. The Runner
11. Trunk
12. Camaro
13. Arizona

:: Record Review

Kings of Leon

Because of the Times
(RCA; 2007)

Rating: 83%
Combined Rating: 71%


With their sophomore effort, the sometimes-forgotten Aha Shake Heartbreak (2004), Kings of Leon did some mad jutting. Having already struck thunder with the rapacious British Hype Machine, who went all ga-ga-ga-ga-ga on the retro-fried licks and diesel fume Americana posited by the group's debut, the Kings got real and took off. Aha Shake Heartbreak is a tantalising show of breadth, brilliant and frustrating in almost equal measure: brother Matthew's bass work evoking (whodathunkit?!) Peter Cook, the sharper songs acting as a fitting excision out of Creedence Clearwater prairie stables, and a sly leg over into more inventive terrains, places where the Followills are able to transcend cheap Pentecostal myths and act as prime agents of their songs, not vice-versa. So, brilliant. Frustrating because, well, for all the maverick dynamics in a "Bucket" or "Soft," the band was still playing it short and swift, somehow slighting the edge, and, in one or two cases, exhausting the ideas before they'd even taken flight.

Because of the Times is the rug-pull. Yeah, you've seen the score already. But here's the deal: this record feels special, and to try to scratch the surface of just why that is, I'm going to have to delve into some personal (though relevant) anecdote. Don't say I didn't warn you.

It's not really that much of a surprise that I bought my first "rock" album the day I got handed my first ever (and, to date, only) detention. This was way back in Britney's pre-coitus era, simpler times, with more homework and less pallor. Being in a "highly selective" academic school, there was, predictably, a lavish (if still highly selective) library kitted out with all the classics: Melville, Chaucer, the Daily Mail. And, of course, Joanna Cole's seminal work Asking about Sex and Growing Up: a Question-and-Answer Book for Boys and Girls, illustrated by Alan Tiegreen, graffed up by just about everyone else. A lot of time was spent, or wasted in this library, depending on which way you look at it. "Fide et literis" was the emblazoned emblem, but here was the place for apostasies; the bigwigs called it "library abuse." If you got kicked out of the library, you were barred from entering again. If you took your chances, you were sent out with a detention. Encores held no dice: just more punitive action, and more time killed. It sounds totally lame, I know. But Mrs. Lowden didn't hesitate to lob that pink slip, and it could have just been coincidence, but it was most definitely a watershed: the same day I first got mine, I forked over a cool ten and brought home, yes, Enema of the State (1999). Things were not the same again.

And though Blink's oeuvre is largely looked upon as a cherry pick of fanciful pop singles, to me it was change. The distortion, the smuttiness, the insolence: even if it was just the inception of a fraction of a fissure, it was the start of something -- Nirvana! Weezer! Led Zeppelin! This was my Youth and Young Manhood (2003), the point at which everything was mixed up, homogeneously erratic, when the wave and the high water mark were one and the same, and, either way, I didn't really care. It was Summer.

Great rock plays this trick of pulling the rug, of leaving one wounded, vulnerable and, most importantly, wanting more. You find a record that does this to you, an Enema or a Siamese Dream (1993), and the instinct is to wear it out: to pillage the addictive thrill till the next release date, and, ultimately, till disappointment. Because when the follow-up was shrink-wrapped in your hands, and all you could think of was what happened the last time, the expectation was in turns overwhelming, fatal and deeply satisfying. Problem is, most erstwhile rug-pullers cheat themselves and enlist straight into carpeting school, with some very flawed logic:

AR doof: "Give the people what they want!"

Rock star: "The people want."

AR doof: "The same! Yes, the same!"

And while Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2001) is superficially "the same" as Enema, it's more accurately "more of the same" -- ergo, not the same.

Because of the Times feels like a second wind. To wit, it's the most single-heavy alt rock record I've come across in a long, long time, an album so buoyant with its own assured strengths as to call to mind some of the great idiopathic LPs of the early-mid '90s halcyon era: The Bends (1995), Diary (1994), Nevermind (1991). Records that introduced or re-defined. Songs that stood the test of time by the virtue of their uniqueness, coagulated out of the mush: but songs built, fundamentally, on top of a tradition.

Kings of Leon aren't here to re-invent the wheel -- they're here to show you and me a couple of things we might have forgotten. The agenda, like the album, is unassuming and simple, but deeply affecting in how the band takes that simplicity and runs the gamut with it. Like the perpetual cadenza, the songs are crowded with a steady procession of highlights that doesn't stop; on almost every song the band takes some wayward turn, and though the ennui-laden vocal distortion of "My Party" initially reeks of a James Murphy cut-off, the way it plays for contrast, finally buckling under a chorus equal part heavenly hoot and skinned cat, is more in line with Doolittle (1989). Caleb Followill's vocals have improved dramatically from the drunken warbling of yore: an instrument with an identity of its own will and persuasion, Caleb's voice displays a startling breadth, and a knack for creating range, hitting the fine, complex line between crazed, shattered and bewitching that worked so well for Black Francis.

The first four songs open up Because of the Times with a sort of mini-suite. "Knocked Up" shows how far the Kings have come and how far they're willing to go by taking up an austere Edge-echoing riff and shuffling rhythm that lesser groups would pass over for being too straightforward. Where others would have felt the anxious urge to overcompensate by hacking up the easy, forthright sway of the snare drum, or whipping out at least one longwinded ukulele solo, the Kings offer us a decompression: stretching the song to what feels like a short seven minutes, and not losing the audience once. This is due, in large part, to the fantastic dynamic of the band and stellar production by Ethan Johns, who teeters to the right side of atmospheric expansion. The goth-prom synths that open first single "On Call" work as an effective foil to the stubby bass and trebly riffs that quake over the magisterial heave-ho of Nathan Followill's sticks, whilst the interesting stop effect that cuts off and mutes Caleb's “be there” refrain as he swoops into the pitch of his cadenza is almost as good as the breathless guitar solo. (Almost.) And instead of over-saddling the record with a top-heavy first half, or settling for permutations of that brilliant opening run, the band cuts loose, the album becoming more ragged as the tracks go by, "Black Thumbnail" vying for stadium rock ecstasy before "Fans" very openly extends its warm, airy vibes to, well, the fans.

The best thing, really, that can be said of Because of the Times is that it works the hardest trick: seeming deeply personal and inclusive, but still having an embrace elastic enough to be universally appealing. Unlike the band's previous records, which come off as unilateral in comparison, the record mines a rich vein of melancholy, of regret and of earned pride that permeates each and every one of these thirteen songs. It's an effusive and palpable charm that's far ahead of the cock-eyed monotony of their peers and their past, but on the charred guitar feedback and see-saw of "The Runner," like every other track here, the Kings play it just on the right side of maturity: grizzled, resigned and forthright, but still impassioned and vindicating enough to build storming crescendos out of tea-cup crooning.

Because of the Times may be a reference to the UPC conference the band attended in their youth. It may slyly allude again to the folklore and tall tale mystique that almost suffocated the Kings of Leon with its pestering press-bait ballyhoo, but that's all scar tissue: the band sounds on fire and ready for another round.

Alan Baban :: 6 April 2007 |