I first listened to Kings of Leon back in 2008 when they released their 4th studio album, Only By the Night, and my 14 year old self found a new favorite band. Granted, that album is not considered to be KoL's best, but that didn't and still doesn't, stop me from enjoying it immensely. Songs like "Manhattan" and "I Want You" still get regular rotation in my CD player.
After backtracking through the band's previous material and finding even more great songs like "Molly's Chambers","Ragoo" and "Tapper Jean Girl" I was in love. Sadly, the band's 2010 release Come Around Sundown was a pretty huge letdown, the same kind of letdown that OBtN was for so many other KoL fans.
Well, it's been nearly 3 years since that album and KoL are "returning to form" on their latest album Mechanical Bull. But, the question is, what form are KoL returning to? The southern tinged hard-rock of their first album? The jangly rock of their sophomore release? Or the early phase of their arena sized rock sound? To me, it's simple, KoL are combining all of their past elements into one release, and for better or worse they have put together an album that sounds like what you'd expect, more KoL.
Personally, as a fan of most of their output, I find myself clinging to songs like "Supersoaker","Rock City" and "Beautiful War" simply because these tracks contain all the things I love about this band; great melodies, catchy choruses and a real knack for driving guitar leads and rhythm sections.
But Mechanical Bull exhibits a key flaw with KoL's recent output; they are just too set in their ways to create anything truly unique to both themselves and rock music at large. Whereas albums like Aha Shake Heartbreak showed a band blossoming into something truly special, MB shows KoL as being a band more concerned with just putting music out there, regardless of whether or not it sounds like a dozen other bands or not. This fact is most evident in the way the album flows, with a lot of the songs in the mid section sounding a little samey-samey with only a couple of standout moments like the track "Comeback Story."
Anyway, I feel like I'm ranting a bit now. In short, I did enjoy listening to MB, and in fact, I pulled some pretty great singles out of this LP. But I just can't say this LP is as good as KoL's earlier stuff, for the simple fact that a lot of it sounds like modified versions of those early songs.
7.0/10
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