City Newspaper Archives - 5/2007
Kings of Leon "Because of the Times"
RCA Records
Published by Dayna Papaleo on May 08, 2007
It's just about the sweetest damn backstory that you ever did hear: three sons of a defrocked Pentecostal preacher form a Southern rock band with their cousin and make the UK howl. Stateside success continues to elude Tennessee's Kings of Leon - unfairly saddled with the comparative "Southern Strokes" due to their pretty youth and advance hype - but "Because of the Times" had best remedy that. Of course the Followill boys' inner Skynyrd is apparent throughout the bold third record, swollen with good songs about bad girls. But tunes like the fuzzy, swirling "McFearless" and the seven-minute album opener (!) "Knocked Up," a defiant rhyme to impending fatherhood, reveal that KOL may have honed a little Edge at the altar of former tourmates U2. Singer Caleb Followill's croaky, tattered vocals remain weirdly endearing, especially on the disc's strongest tracks, the lusty garage rave-up "Charmer" and the wistful "Arizona," its aching guitar coda evoking a lingering summer night drunk on your blue-eyed ruin but "too dumb to surrender."
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