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Kings Of Leon 'Aha Shake Heartbreak'

added 29 October 2004 at 15.31

If Hanna Barbara are after a new cartoon concept they need look no further than the hippy dippy Followill beardies, conquering the world with their up tempo beat music and down home ways. And by the time they’d left a global trail of empty JD bottles, syphilis and it-girl chit chat behind them, they were starting to feel distinctly two-dimensional themselves. So they retired to the family shack to kick up this storm of rock star blues.

So is this The Kings’ ‘In Utero’, a bile-fuelled course of despair designed to ruin everyone’s fun as much as their own?  Not quite, but where ‘Youth And Young Manhood’ mainlined the young spunks’ infectious exuberance right down your spinal column, here’s a more world-weary Kings: tired, drained, mournful. It doesn’t so much bite you on the ass as coil itself slowly tighter around your windpipe.

Self-loathing oozes from Caleb’s barking narratives; he’s the “18, balding, star”, so pumped full of drugs that in ‘Soft’ he can’t summon a hard-on for his childhood crush. “Leading ladies” are nowhere to be found, only the eternal “taper jean girl with a motel face”. Tears are “pooling on the table” – bad emotion buried deep for this bloody exorcism.

‘Velvet Snow’ is a jittery, brawling animal and ‘Four Kicks‘ a distillation of every chugging garage boogie on the first record. Beefheart riffs whip and coil around ‘King of The Rodeo’ and tinny jingles populate ‘Soft’. But often the band seem too cold to rock, lacking that extra push. ‘Pistol Of Fire’ is fun but too simplistic to bear more than a few listens. ‘Slow Night So Long’, repeats the Southern Strokes formula, and only gets interesting when it leads into a strikingly ‘other’ piano-led lounge interlude.

It’s only when the Kings slow down that they bound ahead. ‘Milk’ is ‘Aha Shake…’s dark heart, a brooding masterpiece of loneliness, paranoia and confusion. Caleb (for surely it must be he) waits for a girl who won’t turn up. She’s with someone else… another King? Also stunning is ‘Day Old Blues’, which deals in childhood illnesses and the superficiality of the rock game.

The parallels with The Strokes are greater than ever - a second album which suffers the dual distractions of high expectation and intense personal upheaval. But the band provide enough peaks to mostly keep on course. Whether they’ll survive for another one is anyone’s guess.

Kings Of Leon 'Aha Shake Heartbreak' (Hand Me Down/BMG) Released November 1 2004.

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