Albums and Abominations

By Benjamin Huber-Rodriguez     10/8/13 7:00pm

Innovation in music is strikingly hit-or-miss. Most bands possess a new sound in the release of their initial records, which as they mature, they decide either to push in a new direction or continue working with the already-established formula. While the former can help a band achieve new musical heights, it can also backfire and alienate former fans. Mechanical Bull, the sixth proper studio album by Nashville, Tenn. family band Kings of Leon, is the rare album that does both, bringing the band back to its Southern-rock roots without sacrificing the new artistic dimensions it has acquired over the years.

Kings of Leon burst onto the scene in 2003 with its debut album Youth and Young Manhood and was immediately praised for a Southern-rock style reminiscent of Creedence Clearwater Revival. By the time Only By the Night was released in 2008, the band had achieved a complete reversal from its previous sound, trading in rollicking rock 'n' roll licks about dive bars and loose women for grandiose, arena-rock glory. After the critical and commercial failure of 2010's Come Around Sundown, it appears the Kings listened to their criticism, as Mechanical Bull comes back to all those Southern belles and rowdy bar fights it never should have left. 

 Lead single and opening track "Supersoaker" is a straightforward rock track about girls, guns and the good old delta, while "Rock City" hits with a bluesy riff so smooth it could make Jack White blush. Together, the two tracks put away any doubts that the Followills were born and raised in the land of Dixie.

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No Kings of Leon album has ever been as self-aware as Mechanical Bull, with lines detailing the band's return to its roots, "Picking up the pieces in the world I know / With one in the fire and one in the snow / It's a comeback story of a lifetime." At times, though, the group overdoes it, as on the arena-ready ballad "Tonight," on which lead singer Caleb Followill wails as if Kings of Leon's rebirth were some prophetic event. The band is better when it sticks to fast tunes about fast times, songs in which the subject material never gets too heavy. Particularly catchy are the bouncing, 12-bar boogie of "Family Tree" and the boyish "Temple." These songs are by no means groundbreaking - or even contenders for the best songwriting Kings of Leon has done - but the band knows what it is, and it does Southern rock right.

While Mechanical Bull finds Kings of Leon at its oldest and most self-reflective, it still fits canonically somewhere in 2005 or 2006. The band has given up its more innovative rock attempts, but the Followills still play the straightforward approach remarkably well, sounding simultaneously youthful and like seasoned professionals. The subject matter of the record may leave some longing for more, but the catchy tunes and the teased-out wordplay make Mechanical Bull a fine comeback for a band blinded by its success. 

The cover of the record depicts a dive bar called The Mechanical Bull, where presumably drunken daredevils hop on the back of a robotic beast in the hopes of winning admiration. While Kings of Leon may have been thrown off the bucking bull a few times, it has put a few more drinks away and gotten right back on. So give it the respect it deserves, and see how long it can last this time.

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