I don’t think anybody really needs another Kings Of Leon album do they? Their magnum opus, Aha Shake Heartbreak, has only just remained a genuinely great record after suffering under the weight of the increasingly commercialised tat piled on after it, so surely we certainly don’t need a repeat of Come Around Sundown to stifle it even further. I don’t know whether it’s fair to criticise a band based on only part of their discography, but the Kings are certainly looking less and less regal on recent form, even in the ever shrinking indie royal family. Rather unsurprisingly, futile promises of a more mature, more musically complex album don’t seem to have been fulfilled by new album Mechanical Bull’s first taster single ‘Super Soaker’, out July 17th.
Whilst in 2004 Caleb was brazen enough to write a witty lament about alcohol induced erectile dysfunction in the form of Soft, modern record-label constraints means that it’s highly unlikely ‘Super Soaker’ is going to be about female ejaculation. Hell, with the impact of all that partying on their ever aging bodies, it could just as easily be a song about urinary incontinence.
Despite recalling their old producer Angelo Petraglia, ‘Super Soaker’ sounds weakly indistinguishable from any of the stadium-filling recent material KOL have been trying to distance themselves from, admittedly because the only recordings of it so far are from arena gigs. Because of this, any hope you might have had for the song is soon crushed when you’re forced to think about the thousands of people that are still willing to pay a lot more than they should to woo along to ‘Sex On Fire’. I’m willing to be proved wrong, and I’d love it if the confessedly “youthful” sounding Mechanical Bull turned out to be a throwback to the Kings of old, but I just can’t see it happening.
‘Super Soaker’ is out July 17th, with Mechanical Bull following in full on September 24th
