Kings of Leon Only by the Night June 24, 2009
By Christopher Copeland
Other than fleeting glances in headlines, most of what I had heard about Kings of Leon was ambivalent, or at least it caused me to be ambivalent. The first substantial report I heard about the Kings came via a friend who saw them live and reported back that they melted his face off. Another friend in the Nashville music biz (which is, at least in the grand narrative being constructed about them, home to the Kings) thought they were pricks. I don’t know if he’d met them or not, but that speaks of, at the very least, a severe distaste of the music. My
brother reserved for them the same kind of malice he once saved for boy bands I heard the music sounded sonically spacious. I heard the music sounded garage grunge (not compatible with sonically spacious if you’re keeping tabs). They looked liked The Strokes, they toured with U2, they quickly earned the plaudits (gushings?) of Rolling Stone, none of which are textbook methods for building street cred. They seemed like rock and roll’s answer to Gossip Girl: The only way to like them was ironically, and ironic fetishes are becoming clichéd. Last autumn however
Kings of Leon released Only By the Night. The people I knew who loved them loved them more, but the telltale reaction came from the people who had hated them. It seemed like a collective tucking of the tails behind the legs, sheepish admissions that the new Kings record was really good. My Nashville friend highly complimented a song by “this