Kings of Leon’s music has always expanded to fill the dimensions available to it. As their albums Because of the Times (2007) and Only by the Night (2008) turned them into a festival headliners, so their sound billowed outward from their roots in wiry garage pop to embrace huge, ponderous sections of desert-noir bluster. The results weren’t always welcome, unbalancing their sets to the degree that they often felt like the equivalent of dropping a professional darts player into leg three of an Olympic relay team.
So when the band told me during an interview in August that they hoped to return to club gigs while touring their upbeat return-to-form seventh album Walls, I pictured ferocious country punk half-hours ripping up Old Blue Lasts the world over. That’s some way from the truth.
Playing the pristine, mid-sized student hall 229 is hardly like KOL rocking up and plugging in unannounced on a wet Tuesday at the Dublin Castle, but packed with 600 pumped-up punters who thought they’d be watching Married at First Sight tonight – Prince-style, the gig was announced this morning and sold out in 20 minutes – it has the intended buzz of the hottest ticket in town. As the band take to a stage adorned only with a pair of wrinkled red lips on the backdrop and launch straight into their best song The Bucket, signs are we’re in for a slack-free charge back to the days when the Kings were horny young southern Strokes styled like a bunch of Kentucky farm boys burning disco records in 1978. Having lost their band-of-brothers bond and almost split after Caleb Followill’s onstage meltdown in 2011, surprise club shows like this feel like the Kings reaching out for the reason they played rock music in the first place.
We don’t get a frantic half-hour of ferocious country punk. We get the most perfectly paced and emotionally connected KOL London show in damn near a decade. Clearly revelling in the novelty of being mere feet from the front row and each other, chopping around the setlist to take in an audience request for Arizona, and joking that “we were afraid no one was gonna show up”, the Followill cohorts give their first indication in years of cutting loose; witness Caleb cheerfully flicking picks at the crowd during prom-punk album track Mary, the slow dance that Carrie never had.
Showcasing the bulk of the upbeat Walls helps rattle the show along too. It might be about the harrowing experience of being stalked by a ghost, but the Tango in the Night tones of Find Me slot slickly between the garage rumba of Taper Jean Girl and Milk, a song that sounds like a lonesome Alabama bluesman being regularly interrupted by the mail train rumbling past his shack. Likewise, the spiralling Reverend acts as the euphoric counterpoint to Fans, the sound of mountains line-dancing. The gig’s closeness allow atmospheric wail-alongs like Pyro, often wind-whipped into a sapless mush at festivals, to envelop and overwhelm the way they were always intended to, and even when Knocked Up crushes a pillow over the set’s face, it’s swiftly resuscitated by jubilant recent single Waste a Moment, the new Sex on Fire.
Talking of which, the appearance of their biggest hit at the show’s climax suggests that, even when going this far off-piste, KOL can’t fulfil their ambition of not having to play it. Otherwise, from the southern samba of Around the World to the brace of crowdpleasing first album tunes in Molly’s Chambers and Trani, tonight – like Walls itself – is an act of recharge and realignment, setting KOL up for a period of all-cylinders-firing rejuvenation. “This is the most fun I’ve had playing a show in many years,” Caleb grins, revived by a low roof and the splatter of lager dregs. The feeling’s mutual.
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