The shaggy twentysomethings once heralded as the Southern Strokes have turned a corner. Long story short, the family act known for whipping up "The O.C."-friendly stews of Dixie rock and Detroit garage bravado has hopped on Bono's wagon. Maybe they dream of colonizing grander spaces by sanding their edges to capture a spacious, safe brand of rock'n'roll. Could arena rock be their ticket out of the 1970's? Will the matching body hair shtick follow?
Six minutes into the swampland soap opera of "Knocked Up" you begin to doubt, haircuts aside, whether they truly have morphed into the Southern U2, and whether the universe would permit that. After a long rattling by Nathan Followill's crisp percussion, broken by passages of wall-like fuzz, you still have a minute left, and your doubts remain. The song's bare rhythms distract you from the movie-of-the-week yarn tangled above the simple sounds. This week: A couple who, parents be damned, are gonna have that baby.
As a deathless testament to the father-to-be's devotion, or as a classic gesture of rebellion, the story just doesn't wash. It sounds a little stagey. Forays into romance like "True Love Way" and "Arizona" also tailspin into the ground. After all, despite their studio ambitions, the Kings still only have two subjects: Dangerous women and themselves. All their blurry visions of sin seem to zero in on girls who amused or wronged them, a train of femme fatales out of some sweaty bayou noir, forever pulling them off the straight and narrow. Poor country boys just can't catch a break, it seems.
Seeking stability amid the rough-and-tumble, Kings of Leon still lean on regressive sonics. After beginning with a ghostly prelude straight off a Popol Vuh record, lead single "On Call" congeals into a straight-ahead rock song, complete with an agreeably noodly bridge and echoing hooks. On "Black Thumbnail", the Followills warp us back to the era of hair-metal bombast, too caught up with itself to build on the template.
Unlike these one-dimensional time capsules, "Charmer" remains open to interpretation. First, as a sinister post-punk specimen, the bloody-murder shrieks of Black Francis slicing high above a subterranean Wire riff. Or second, as a recording of David Lee Roth being electrocuted à la the first Ghostbusters. Given the song's villain is another cardboard maneater stereotype ("She stole my karma, oh no/ Sold it to the farmer, oh no"), the latter reading seems a safer bet.
A cynical, acoustic sing-along, "Fans" slyly presents narcissism as gratitude. (Remember the two themes.) You know the routine: the band tours, generously measures its own importance, then transcribes journal entries about the cosmic emptiness of fame. With two stanzas ending with "Make a sound for me" and "The king they want to see," the song forms a heartfelt tribute to their real No. 1 fans: Kings of Leon.
Flirtations with big-sky atmospherics can hardly hold these songs together. What sounds like a hodgepodge of Edgy experiments and raised-Zippo nostalgia is just that: a hodgepodge. If there is a common strand, it is the ugly, faux-blues notion that women are the fount of pain and suffering, the cause of the Followills' "black as coal" hearts. It makes Because of the Times sound suspiciously like a counterattack on womankind, launched from somewhere in the mid-1990s, deep inside a bruised, stadium-sized ego.
