Album Review: Kings of Leon’s Come Around Sundown

Kings of Leon

RCA Records: Come Around Sundown

It took four whacks for the Followill family to finally hit the nail on the head, but with the debut of their fourth studio album Only By the Night in 2008, the Kings of Leon crept their way onto the radio waves with hits like “Sex On Fire” and “Use Somebody” and into the category of alternative rocks finest (in America at least, they’ve been a hit in the UK for years).

Although the Kings have embraced their newfound role in the US’s foremost music scene, they haven’t let the scene direct their artistic direction. The band, comprised of three brothers and their cousin, have discarded the mysterious, dark formula that thrust them into prominence and have absorbed the roots of the laidback southern rock that inhabits their native Tennessee.

Come Around Sundown is a big, fat, lazy southern barbeque all the way through. The kind where everybody sits in their aluminum chairs in their overalls and indulges in the delightfully devious parts of life; all while never once getting up from their seat. As far as pop success goes, this album isn’t as catchy and doesn’t have many songs that provide that one “addicting” hook – it is Sex-On-Fire-less. The band has gone back to making songs from the gut, not the brain, and in this instance – the gut has never growled louder.

Never mind the murky, rebel soul of Only By The Night, the Followill clan has composed songs that reek of celebration, rejoice and the pleasures of life. “Mary” is a jovial hymn about tying the knot. From a wailing (almost painful sounding) Caleb Followill vocal melody that rains upon slow, dragging percussion, Followill yells, “Mary if you wanna, I’ll waive my right, I’ll be on the corner, just passing time, no I wont never once make you cry, just a kiss oh I’ll miss your goodbye” right into a mid tempo solo with a buzz as sticky as the humid southern weather.

One similarity from this album to the one before is the fantastic bass by youngest brother Jared Followill. He handles his weapon with the fervor of a lead guitar on songs like “Pony Up” and the album’s first single, “Radioactive” where he kicks off the numbers. Fast, distorted, plucked melodies that do as fine a job igniting as a matchbook with naked ladies on it.

And while on the topic of naked ladies, the one who probably has no problem snagging a groupie is Caleb. His magnificent voice shines all over Come Around Sundown. It’s almost as if he created a new language based off his voice and he is the only one that can speak it. High yet scratchy, sharp yet bountiful – Caleb does a wondrous job for the second time around. Whether he yowls a chorus, stuttering the last word of a verse or just playing humming, he sounds like rusty, laidback cowboy singing campfire songs.

“Pyro” is one of the album’s highlights. A lazy guitar rides a humming bass while Caleb stretches out the simple words “I will never be your cornerstone” into a lavish bellow, cueing the explosion of all instruments involved into a loud ruckus.

The winner is the lead song “The End.” A song filled with the epic-ness of a closing number but ingeniously placed as the opener. It’s a song that features lines about the longing to be someone’s rock before the end approaches. Whatever the end may be, you can hear in Caleb’s voice that he really doesn’t want it to come. The same could be said about the band. Even if it took them more than a decade to get to the top doesn’t mean they should ever come down.

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