Falling From Grace - 10-28-10

I bought the ticket on line through one of those trading sites, paid twice the face value and managed to pogo my way through the throng to get into the sweating moving mass and as my ears rang and buzzed afterwards I thought it was one of the best live gigs I had been to. It was August 2008 and the band was the Kings of Leon, they played for 2 hours and they played everything the ecstatic noisy throng wanted with an immense Knocked Up prior to the 2 encores.

I was ambivalent to the ensuing 4th album, Only by The Night, it was good and crawled into many people’s hearts, it was not a wasted time but neither would it make my bucket list. So I was intrigued to see what new delights the Come Around Sundown album would deliver, I recorded it off their own streaming site and went off to run the trails to use it as my soundtrack for the Fall footfalls in the local forest.

Schadenfruede is that sickening guilty pleasure at other’s misfortune but what do you call the sickening sense of disappointment at a hero’s fall from grace, the total displeasure at their failure? Arguably a subtle but gentle lack of excitement over some time might be a better way to fall but the new offering is such a complete bitch slap to the face, a WTF shock to the system like falling off your bike or catching an edge on your snowboard while half a sleep on a flat transition.

Now the Followill brood are never going to be picking up prizes for the prose of their pop but this plumbs new depth of putrid punk pronouncements. Mi Amigo, which should be banned as a song title unless  its by a Mexican equivalent of Abba, contains references to getting drunk - thats novel - and how large his ( Caleb?) manly weapon is. Pick Up Truck, again song naming not their strength here, is quoted above and is only surpassed in its inanity by Mary, a cod doo-wop styling that actually does say “We'll go to the disco....I'll dance like your boyfriend”, I shit you not.

So in a way its unfair to criticize the boys on their lyrics, after all they are poster children for home education, what they somehow managed to have was a mix of hard driving rock beats and enough hooks to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. That was until Sundown.

Now the sound is just a pastiche of their earlier albums, twice its just a recycle of early songs ( Beachside and Pyro) and the most typical and least annoying song Radioactive just sounds like a remix of Arizona from Because the Night. We have ‘yee haa’s’ and cheery mentions of the old south plus now we have backing singers. But their biggest crime if not against humanity at least against their fans is to take a sound that was a cross between Exile era Stones and an alt-country version of Heaven Up Here Echo & The Bunnymen and to turn it into radio friendly dirge rock. It plods, it grunts, it limps like a two-hundred and fifty pound woman weaving through the frozen food section at Walmart. They seem to be channelling Eddie Money or Van Halen, this is rock ballad country with slow burning drums and non existent bass, I can see people reaching for their lighters now, the bad videos are flooding in flashback now. Someone needs to tell these guys that the late 80’s was a terrible time for rock, we dont want to go back there...nurse, more medication please.

So what should you be drinking while listening to someone commit critical hari-kiri? The temptation is to go with something that also fails miserably to deliver on its promise but in this case I think something strong and robust to help us forget our sorrows and disappointment. So I am going with Oren Swift’s The Prisoner 2008, meaty, big and bouncy. As Dave Phinney has sold out this wine brand it may never be the same again after the 2009 vintage so use the money you would have spent on the new Kings of Leon album and concert tickets and invest in getting hold of the ’08 while you can...

"But when he pulled in & revved it up, I said "you call that a pickup truck?" 

And in the moonlight I throw him down, all kickin' screamin' and rollin' around, 

A little piece of a bloody tooth, just so you know I was thinkin' of you" 
indeed....