Kings Of Leon Only by the Night by: Thomas Mendelovits Mon:27-Oct-08 Label: RCA Year: 2008 WB rating 64 out of 100

More than anything, on Only by the Night the brothers (and cousin) Followill strike a sorry, confused figure. Puppy-dog moments tousle with tough guy posturing, and all the while the poor Kings are moving into their mid-20s! All those spoils- the ‘17’ year old girls, the ‘Sex on Fire’, dancing in ‘Manhattan’- must be tough to cope with, harder still to get your head around. And, whether wittingly or not, Only by the Night puts the Kings of Leon onto the mantle as the biggest American indie-rock band of 2008. Perhaps it’s unfair to hold them up to the light, and maybe a lot has happened to the boys since “18, balding, star”, but seriously, the most amazing thing about their fourth record is not the base song craft, the heavy-handed stadium-sized theatrics, or the paucity of soul, it’s that there is not a single clever thought on it. Hot damn, nothing on Only by the Night really makes sense: “sex on fire”? The ‘veiled’, mealy-mouthed, political-as-sexual commentary of ‘Crawl’? It’s all so vacuous, so huge, so shiny and so glutinous, Only by the Night could only ever be Rock Album of the Year. In this at least, it mostly succeeds.          

Another way that Only by the Night works is as a textual record of the Followills’ progression from Southern sons of a preacher man to world-beating rock heroes. Listening again to the song with the cool line that put ‘18’ and ‘balding’ together (‘The Bucket’ from 2005’s Aha Shake Heartbreak), one notices how Caleb Followill’s vocal gets more and more impersonal across each album. Here, he sounds as much like a post-grunge icon as the Country rock yelper of yore. This is as much a trend in the lyrics. Where Aha Shake (and to an extent, 2007 effort Because of the Times) was filled with strange and often funny (if not clever) personal observations, has a lot of songs about nothing much. ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Revelry’ are interchangeable, respectively opening with the lines: “I like to dance all night” and “what a night for a dance”. ‘Be Somebody’ and ‘Use Somebody’ (with an awful, perhaps unintended, ambiguity in the word ‘use’) are also strikingly similar, and not just in title- there are way too many samey mid-tempo power ballads on the record. It’s anthemic in a Blink 182 way: one or two work, but after that, they start to lack any semblance of charm.

Augmenting this process, the band has by now totally traded in their jangly riffs and skiffles for tremolo and big, heavy-hitting beats soaked in verb. You could hear this happening on Because of the Times - for example, the chords behind hit single ‘On Call’ were superfluous - but here, they have been completely done away with. There is not one clean, or strummed, guitar line on the album. Instead, most of the songs (‘Be Somebody’, ‘Closer’) are built around little licks plucked, fuzzed and feedbacked into grandiosity. While this is a delightful and innovative recording device to hear at first, for gutsy rock n’ roll it is a problem. Call it epic rock, without the killer riffs. Thus, there is little to satisfy the careful listener: apart from the self-consumed grandiosity of it all, Only by the Night is basically a record of big, silly lyrics and big, silly beats.  

In its two reference points of 80s power-ballads and post-grunge, one is forced to wonder whether the Kings of Leon have really just ‘sold out’ with this one. While never being a country-rock band in the true sense of the word, Only by the Night opts singularly for an anthemic quality over the cheeky boogie that made following the escapades of the debauched Followills mildly entertaining in the first place. Seeing the Kings at the Big Day Out in 2006, I was struck by how poorly Aha Shake translated to festival conditions. Only by the Night, then, is perhaps the record they made to belong on festival bills and in stadiums. Only the most basic of emotions can translate in these cavernous and gaping expanses, however, and in creating music for this situation, the Kings of Leon have a record in Only by the Night that will appeal mostly to teenagers and those after the big-communal-emotion-experience. Diehard indie fans will hate it, but that may just be a truly great thing.