Dr. Heartbreak: or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Kings of Leon

Wed Dec 7, 02:01 PM by

The perils of love! Sometimes writing about a record you love is harder than writing something nasty about one you hate. The words don’t come — you’re too close or it’s too close to you. So you obsess and stay up late and talk to friends about it and listen to it everywhere you go — on headphones walking to the mailbox, in your car driving across country, or at home in your mind whilst listening to other music — thus blowing your concentration and knocking you off your game.

But then it comes to you — some perfect combination of caffeine and booze and being up too late or getting up too early — and there you are. Clarity. Instantly. Like a crisp clap of thunder… your mind opens, your brain’s gears click over and fire like pistons — and suddenly you understand that Kings of Leon is really the Velvet Underground, but Southern bred — the silvery jumble of guitar strums, it’s all there, but this time Lou Reed looks less like a monkey, and sounds like he’s maw-mouthing crawfish, sucking the heads, throwing the shells on the floors of sawdust saloons, and hooting for more. And instead of heroin blues and getting blown by trannies, he’s singing about vanity, impotence, and Oklahoma – with bigger themes cloaked in the rural guise of folkiness and hicky colloquialism.

The first song on Aha Shake Heartbreak is propulsive — the guitars racing like horses toward the end of the song — so much so, that you talk faster, or type faster, or drive faster ‘til your engine stinks or your hands carpal themselves into crab claws or your jaw just aches and pops.

The record unfolds before you because now you’re a genius, NOW you get it — the guitars chug like the muggy bawl of semi-trucks, swaying in hot summer gusts, beating down the highway towards a heatwave’s mirage. Songs about carnality are all Southern hep slang, slurred by cool or liquor, as singer Caleb Followill yowls, “You paint my fingers/You paint my toes/You let your perfect nipple show.”

Then the songs banana peal off their skin and sound completely new, rock ‘n’ roll born again from pieces of Chuck Berry’s scrappy chin beard, the New York Dolls’ sense of fun, and early Robert Plant’s You-Are-Mine steez.

“Way down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans!”

“Personality crisis, you got it while it was HOT!”

“I’ve been dazed and confused for so long I can’t lose!”

Kings of Leon. Second album. Hand Me Down Records. Three brothers and a cousin from Nashville. Nathan, Jared, Matthew, and Caleb Followill. Sons of an evangelist preacher. Critically acclaimed in England. Loved by the loving UK press. Unknown to your average US dude or lady — though they’re dudes that look like ladies, so they’ll be huge.

Beyond that, it’s a BBQ brushed coat of gooey roadhouse swagger, lyrics about being too drunk to get it up, arrogance face–to-face with self-depreciating humor. (Caleb sings about his “comb-over” and about balding, though he’s got a full head of hair, go figure.) There’s ‘70s cokehead tour-plane rock, sleazy Steely Dan detail-orientated writing, Elvis Costello hiding behind a barn somewhere (Costello, who knows he’ll get his ass kicked if he dares show his face, but goddamn if he’s not going to squirt some influence in there, some bit of pop songwriting inspiration.)

But by then your brain’s cross-referencing sparkplugs pop and burn, melting into your engine, and you condense into vapor and go between the plastic layers of the CD, inside the bass drum on track four, knees up to your chin, sipping a glass bottled Dr. Pepper with a red and white paper straw and feeling the shake, while the band goes nuts like a bayou Joy Division. But confident—the confidence of youth—never self-conscious or desirous of anything passive or too artsy.

It’s near the end of the record now, and Caleb’s singing about a big rumble, of getting his “guns from the South,” of taking to the yard “like a cockfight” and serving Southern justice underneath his shoe. You’re almost there, you’re almost with them, you’re almost feeling the sun baking your neck while the green grass grows all around, all around, almost hearing the flit of mosquitoes by a hot ear, or the cool babble of the crick in the back, but you go deeper into the music, fall further into the center of the CD, spinning around the center hole’s circumference like a ghost…

And then you’ve been killed, gutted, and strung onto a guitar — your shit-flecked intestines zinging leads and solos that feel as American as the wind rippling wheat fields in Iowa. Though sorta British, too. But British aping Little Richard, like the Stones or Rod Stewart. So, British pretending to be primitive American rock ‘n’ rollers pretending to be black bluesmen pretending to be sweaty, maroon-painted tribal African drum beaters, pretending to be hitting rocks together by the flicker of red ember light at an ancient nomadic campfire, and feeling Rhythm for the first time since Earth’s birth.

And then you’re fucked, twisted, too involved to think about the record anymore. So you sit back in your car seat and keep driving — drive past all the things the band is singing about, imagining the endless cities with underage ladies late for school, the fistfights and switchblades in yards, the girl at the fair with the bubbly eyes. It passes by, half in your mind’s eye, half in the green rush of scenery. But really just playing on the stereo, loud and vibrant at 11:30am on a Sunday morning. Loud and vibrant over the Texas/Oklahoma border.

“The only thing that would ruin this band for me is if they just stood still on stage like The Strokes,” says your girl, in the car seat next to you, idly thumbing through the liner notes. And that’s it — perfect. Case closed. Like says old dead Ronnie VanZant, long-ago nose-dived into Mississippi soil, “Turn it up.”

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