Review Summary: The Kings of Leon take on their most mature release, and despite a few falters, its their best album yet.
After the Kings of Leon’s third album Because of the Times was released, writing for the next album began almost immediately. Recording began from late winter to early summer, thus becoming the fourth studio album by the Kings of Leon, know as Only by the Night, released in September of 2008. The band has gone through a slight sound change from previous albums, but only for the better. The Kings of Leon are a powerful band, and probably one of the best mainstream bands around right now. With chart topping songs like
Sex on Fire and
Use Somebody, the Kings newest release Only by the Night is their strongest to date.
The first two songs on the album are
Closer and
Crawl, the latter being the best of the two, are regardless phenomenal opening tracks for the album.
Crawl has an electric feel to it, in relation with some Nine Inch Nails songs. Neither one of the songs is the best on the album but they’re not the weakest either. This leads us to the first single
Sex on Fire which has a funny story behind it. The original name was not “sex”, in fact there were many choice of what is “on fire”, one of with was “Cocks on Fire”. No matter what the name is though this is one of the best songs on the album, it’s very unique and well written. It’s a fantastic first single, although it fails in comparison to the next single,
Use Somebody, the best song on the album. It’s probably one of the most mature songs the Kings of Leon have put out, but it also shows off the talents of every member of the band.
Use Somebody also has a companion song later on in the album,
Be Somebody, also one of my favorites. It begins with a quick beat, and deep guitar playing, but once the chorus hits then it all becomes more upbeat. The song is about the ups and downs on the road to fame, thus the reasoning for the comparison of the dark verse and upbeat chorus.
Sadly though the second half of the album falters in comparison to the first half (excluding a few songs of course), it’s not bad by any means, but songs like
Manhattan and
Notion can’t live up to strength of the first four tracks. The song
17, takes another sexual turn similar to that of
Sex on Fire, as its about being involved with a seventeen year old girl. It’s actually quite a perverted song, not the worst song, but not good either. Really there is so BAD song on the album, just a couple unexciting tracks.
The album is brought to an end with the song
Cold Desert, like the opening track
Closer, its placed in a good spot on the album,
Closer is good at opening the album, and
Cold Desert is good at closing the album. Overall though the album is good as a whole, no filler at all, about four or five really strong tracks and maybe two or three weak points, using “weak” for lack of a better word. Only by the Night is the most mature Kings of Leon release to date, and the band in general makes some other mainstream alternative rock bands look like a heaping pile of ***. Which many of them probably are.
High Points:
-Crawl
-Sex on Fire
-Use Somebody
-Be Somebody
Low Points:
-Manhattan
-Notion
