Once upon a time it was Kings Of Leon’s hair that straggled – now it’s their songs. “The pleasures of this life, I’m told / Will spit you out in the middle of the road,” Caleb Followill sings on the opening track to the Nashville rockers’ eighth record, ‘When You See Yourself’ – and that seems to be exactly what’s happened here. After two decades of rough and rowdy fame, the band trundle through these eleven tracks like a caravan down the A303.
In 2008, the band’s fourth album ‘Only By The Night’ generated a level of success almost too big for their boots to contain. Transported from shindig to stadium, unlike noughties peers The White Stripes and The Strokes, KOL’s noisy victory jarred with their original identity. In England at least, they came to represent lager-chugging lads: Vice called the inescapable ‘Sex On Fire’ “the apex, death and afterlife of landfill indie all in one go”. This image overtook their early days of flared & long-haired jamming, and sturdy numbers like ‘Molly’s Chambers’.
Perhaps a post-‘Sex On Fire’ dip was inevitable: unfortunately, KOL seem to have settled into it. With tracks often lumbering beyond four minutes, ‘When You See Yourself’ risks becoming the kind of record bought by people who don’t really like music, or just want some background sound from their fancy living room speaker system.
‘When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away’ starts the album off like an Explosions In The Sky post-rock anthem running in low power mode. Halfway through the fifty-minute record, the gentle cruise finally hits choppier waters with ‘A Wave’, and the generally more interesting second half peaks with the lively ‘Echoing’. But ‘Supermarket’ is about as fun as the weekly shop (and just the kind of song that haunts the aisles during an uninspiring quest for dinner), in contrast to Townes Van Zandt-inspired lead single ‘The Bandit’, which harks back to the band’s days of “reckless abandon”.
The refined, often bass-focused production is muddied not by the album’s mid-tempo tendencies, but by some vintage studio kit, such as the barge-like synths on ‘A Wave’ and ‘100,000 People’. Though Caleb’s vocals remain distinctive – you can always recognise a KOL song – the cloudy production helps to mask leaden lyricism. Every track consists of a stack of bland platitudes that may or may not relate to each other. ‘When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away’ is the kind of phrase that sounds deep for a second, until you actually start to think about it. On ‘A Wave’, the statement “Cause the lifе that we live is better living / Than living alone” makes zero sense, as frustrating to decipher as an optical illusion.
Some better lines arrive on the topic of youth – “You’re only passing through a form of you / I look in your eyes and there’s a rage” Caleb sings on ‘Golden Restless Age’ – but there’s an awful lot of plodding middle-aged love too. Introspection needn’t be dull, no matter where you are in life. But if Kings Of Leon want to make music that doesn’t rely on sweat-drenched stadium energy or straggly-haired Americana, they at least need something to say.