It’s hard to pinpoint when Kings of Leon stopped enjoying themselves. They were never the most profound band of the aughts rock revival, but they were the ones who bought in most completely, dressing like the group from Almost Famous and living like an audition for a Behind the Music special. Yet once they achieved their hard-fought arena stardom, the obligations of running a rock band as a major enterprise sapped any residual freedom and impulsivity from their music. Their records grew bigger while the personalities behind them shrank. It’s been 10 years since the last Kings of Leon song anybody wants to karaoke, and the band is still chasing the shadow of their mammoth late-’00s hits.
The group’s eighth album, When You See Yourself, briefly teases what a winning Kings of Leon album could sound like in 2021. Surprisingly light on its toes, opener “When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away” is bright with pinging polyrhythms. It’s the most jubilant the band has sounded in years, and while it’s not their normal lane, it suggests there might be a path forward in shamelessly pilfering from the perkier, neon-painted corners of contemporary alternative. This band has been old beyond their years for so long, maybe it’s time they skewed young for once.
But When You See Yourself isn’t that kind of album. It’s the only kind of album Kings of Leon know how to make anymore, which is a minor variation of the last one, and the one before that. The most, if not only novel thing about this album is that it is the first album in history available as an NFT, a cryptographic way to sell art and music online. Forget about the Southern Strokes or the Southern U2. They’ve now spent most of their career as the Southern post-Antics Interpol, a band desperately clinging to a sound that’s stopped working, trying to write songs that soar but capable only of ones that wallow.
Lending to that unwelcome sense of déjà vu is returning WALLS producer Markus Dravs, a Brian Eno disciple who’s engineered records for Coldplay and Arcade Fire. As a For Your Consideration Grammy submission, his work is impeccable—almost every track sounds like an expensive technical feat. But in practice, his production competes with these songs more than it complements them, eclipsing them like skyscrapers oblivious to any lakefront view they may be blocking. The mix saves the worst of its wrath for Caleb Followill, whose voice it continually finds new and cruel ways to bury. On “Fairytale,” Followill’s unloved yowl is reduced to a red wine stain trying to stand out against a busy carpet.
Followill has never been an easily decipherable vocalist to begin with, but the lyrics that are audible place him inside a dreary mid-life rut. On the cosmically forlorn “Time in Disguise,” one of the record’s many tracks pitched at the tempo of mid-period Coldplay album cut, he can’t shake his own obsolescence: “Close your eyes and what do you see?/Is it a man or masked machine?” Even more dejected is the country-hued “Supermarket,” where Followill promises “I’m going nowhere, if you’ve got the time.” Followill is 39, but from these songs, you’d think he’s workshopping one of Rick Rubin’s end-of-life albums.
Is this what anybody wants to hear from this band? While Kings of Leons’ early albums left plenty to nitpick—namely the repulsive 1970s sexual politics—they had a guy’s-night-out energy that could be infectious if you bought into a particular fantasy notion of masculinity. When You See Yourself, on the other hand, packs in all the carnality of a weekend run to The Container Store. It’s hard to imagine the wild-maned early incarnation of Kings of Leon even wanting to listen to a band like this, let alone play in one. In truth, their current iteration doesn’t sound all that thrilled about it, either.
Buy: Rough Trade
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