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Only by the Night

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ASIN: B001E4QLN6

Category: Music

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Editorial Review: Amazon.co.uk Review
Already on course to be one of the year’s biggest sellers, Only By the Night has sealed Kings of Leon’s unlikely position as Britain’s favourite American rock band. The Followill brothers (and cousin) have always been tagged as part of a southern rock tradition of family bands such as the Allmans and Lynyrd Skynyrd, a label they vehemently refuted. But the skinny lads certainly looked like a classic rock act, even as they took musical inspiration from indie contemporaries The Strokes and eighties new wave acts such as The Cure and New Order. Only By the Night is effectively a sequel to 2006′s terrific Because of the Times, their third record and the first where they nailed their own sound, a striking amalgam of bluesy vocals and post-punk primitivism. In comparison Only By the Night consolidates rather than advances their style. The appropriately incoherent “Sex on Fire”, already a chart topping single, is catchy but sounds lightweight next to songs like the fierce “Crawl” and the stadia-ready “Cold Desert” and “Manhattan”. The dissonant, almost amateurish “17″ is most out of place, though Caleb Followill still bawls it with the same passion he brings to even the clumsiest couplet. More notable are several sparse romantic pleas that often borrow licks from classic Southern soul. The yearning “I Want You” is little more than its title, but it certainly convinces, while “Revelry” and the vulnerable “Use Somebody” show signs of impending maturity. Only By the Night‘s simplicity certainly has a wide appeal. –Steve Jelbert

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The Music

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ASIN: B00006FX2Y

Category: Music

Price: New Prices From :- £2.98

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Editorial Review: Amazon.co.uk Review
The Music, the much-touted quartet of schoolmates from Kippax, Leeds, signal their self-titled debut album’s intentions straight from the off. Opener “The Dance”, with its psych-rock swirl intro, a Beatlesque “yeah yeah yeah”, and then a crashing, impatient chaos of guitars, drums and dubby effects, with Robert Harvey howling Robert Plant-ishly about “angels”, is a ridiculous blast of unrestrained noise. The Music are not about subtlety or coffee-table good taste.

The Music gives a sideways nod to baggy beats and the Stone Roses’ Second Coming, but is mainly a wild, almost desperate mix of Led Zeppelin blues-metal histrionics, and the stadium end of 1980s alt-rock, particularly the Chameleons, the Cult and U2. The lyrics are little more than excuses for Harvey to howl and wail, but the constant twin-guitar invention of Harvey and Adam Nutter, taking in everything from bluesy riffs through funky wah-wah to Edge-ish atmospherics, keep you endlessly guessing and enthralled by their sheer recklessness. Put simply, it’s a breath of fresh air to hear a British “indie” band who are so unafraid to rock, so blatantly uninterested in choirboy self-pity, and so almost comically in thrall to chest-beating Big Rawk. –Garry Mulholland

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