Kings of Leon review – your chemistry is not on fire

Although it’s nearly a decade since their fourth album, Only By the Night, made them household names around the world, familial Nashville manband Kings of Leon only now seem to be fully firing again after years in which the pressures and distractions of massive fame and attendant internecine tensions seemed to threaten to break them up.

Their seventh album, WALLS, strikes a note of reaffirmed purpose, even if that purpose is writing blustering choruses for crowds to holler woah-a-woah to at festivals. And yet, as they conclude a European arena tour, this show doesn’t exactly present a wealth of evidence to suggest the Followills are still in it for fun. A clever setup that for the first half boxes in the brothers-plus-cousin combo near the front of the stage, surrounded by a big ruffled red velvet curtain, creates the illusion of them performing in a theatre-sized space and implies a desire to get back to whatever kind of basics are achievable at sold-out enormodome level. In the first half-hour we get Four Kicks, Molly’s Chambers and The Bucket, songs happily recalling the band’s mid-noughties emergence when they were all tight jeans, fast guitars and raging hormones.

Schoolkids heating Biros with a Bunsen burner have generated more chemistry than the Kings achieve tonight, with serious-faced singer-guitarist Caleb, bequiffed bassist Jared, tattooed drummer Nathan and baby-faced guitarist Matthew, their cousin, scarcely acknowledging one another for two hours. Over delves into Interpol-style chugging monochrome post-punk, while Eyes on You does nothing to ward off hackneyed mention of when they used to get called “the southern Strokes”. Much more enjoyable is rumba ballad Muchacho, a tender, understated thing commemorating the passing of a friend. “He was my favourite friend of all,” sings Caleb soberly, staring into the middle distance as he strums an acoustic guitar.

Sex on Fire is one of only a handful of numbers tonight that properly arouses the people in the cheap seats; a song Kings of Leon seem so conflicted about you wonder if they wouldn’t prefer to unwrite it, if it meant they wouldn’t also have to unpay their mortgages. The show reaches its theatrical pivot point as the Followills perform WALLS’ steadily unfurling title track and, with some heavy-handed symbolism, the velvet curtain rises to reveal a much larger and more complicated stage set.

Perched on risers, two backing musicians on guitar and keys have, it would appear, been somewhat cruelly hidden back there playing invisibly for the first 14 songs. The final, full-beam phase of the show should be the clincher but instead proves a booming yawn, as Closer, Crawl, Pyro and other interchangeably windy songs power on the predictable arena-rock dynamics. The wordless chorus of Use Somebody, Kings of Leon’s X Factor-mauled windiest of sub-U2 gale-force anthems, is latched on to by an audience in full voice. Caleb dabs his brow with a handkerchief and says a polite farewell in one of his few speaking moments, before Waste a Moment speeds the set to a close. While there was much to admire about this slick and tidy performance, equally there was something uncomfortable about watching a band who just can’t seem to find ease with their own success.