BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Kings of Leon
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Kings of Leon
I've been enjoying the Kings of Leon for a week or so, since the last Entertainment Weakly had a typically superficial and pointless one-page article about them. So yeah, useless article, but I was curious enough to YouTube them, and it wasn't awful; kind of punk rock country blues, at first listen. So I grabbed all of their albums, and while they're a mixed bag, I'm enjoying them. The first and third albums best, then the second, and the fourth and most recent is my least favorite. That one contains their one big hit (thus far) Sex on Fire. That's a good song, but it's by far the best one by far on that album, is about the only uptempo song on that album.
On the whole, their music is catchy and lively, but not very original. Unless a fusion of lots of disparate sounds is original, in your book. The penalty rock fans pay to passing decades is that all new music eventually sounds just like something you remember from 10 or 15 years ago. That's certainly the case with Kings of Leon, and I constantly hear pieces of songs that sound exactly like a tune I'd heard, liked, and forgotten during the first Clinton administration.
The slower songs sound like Paw mixed with a less gospel-ly Black Crowes, the shorter punkier ones have White Stripes type guitar riffs with Green Day pacing, and on the whole they're fairly interchangable with various other contemporary white boy indie/soul bands, like Secret Machines and/or Cold War Kids.
I enjoy the shorter, faster, louder Kings of Leon tracks, and have listened to a play list of 18 or 20 of them at the gym the last 3 nights. Tonight, for some reason, Head to Toe insinuated it into my consciousness, and I must have listened to it 15x in a row while lifting weights, clicking back to replay the 2:06 track each time it ended. The song isn't actually very good, but I just love that crackily voiced jangily chorus, and it has a good thumping rhythm for weight lifting. It worked for me, anyway.
Better yet, the first return when I searched it on YouTube was the song edited over the twist contest scene from Pulp Fiction, and it's even got the song lyrics subtitled in. There was no way I couldn't post that combo, so here you go.
I'm not sure I wanted to see the lyrics; I think I enjoyed it more when all I heard was the guy babbling random words in that Gilbert Godfried-esque rasping squawk:
Oh he suka suka fama hed dah'ah tos! Oh he suka suka fama hed dah'ah tos!
Honestly, is "Ah he's such a sucker from her head to her toes." really an improvement over my misheard version, for sheer sonic revelry? I think not. It's like listening to a Rammstein song; you're better off not knowing what they're talking about, or even being able to discern the German into individual words. Better you just regard the voice as another instrument, mixed into the rest of the music.
