Kings Of Leon were not always a slightly boring stadium filling band - their first album came out at about the same time as The Strokes, resulting in them being packaged (as they were a pretty heavily styled and marketed band, in the same way The Strokes were) as a more homely, good-ol-boy country rockin' example of the skinny-white-guys-with-guitars class. I loved that album, a neat (by that I mean short and tight) collection of great rock 3 minute singles with enough changes to still make it their best record.
This is their second album - an album I didn't get for an age as I felt that as much as I enjoyed their first record it seemed to say all they possibly could with their style of unintelligible vocals and Creedence-vs-Strokes guitars. Massive saturation of the singles quickly changed my mind, or wore me down.
Their more recent stuff is now played so much on all media and has reached such insipid levels of cliche that it's a bit hard to listen to their earlier stuff without thinking of them droning on and on and on about fire and sex (or some other crap). Initially I loved this album, playing it all of the time, then the lack of any real tone or style change throughout the record eventually started wearing. Those little 3 minute hook laden stompers they do still sound great in isolation (Soft is the albums highlight) but a whole abum's worth is a little too linear to suffer repeated listenings.
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