Only By the Night

"Oh wow. Now I have a choice between following in Cook's steps and reviewing an album I hate, or just following my rainbow-filled path in reviewing good albums. OR: I could do both! HA! That would certainly out-indie Cook!" Well, now you know my thought process of how I come to review Only By the Night by the famous Kings of Leon. This album I have a love-hate relationship with: all the songs are actually brilliant and I like listening to them but they ALL SOUND THE SAME >:( This obviously doesn't make me very happy.

So to begin: the instrumentals can be extremely awesome at times. But at other times? Not so much. A prime example is in "Crawl". The song seems just like a mash of random sounds from a guitar, drum set, bass and voice. None of it works in conjunction so you end up having the feeling that each player is trying to out-play each other on a subtle level. Then there's things like in "I Want You". There's an insistent cowbell playing through pretty much the whole song. It makes no sense to put it in! They could have just inserted a ride cymbal or something but nooooo they had to be hipster and all and put in a fucking cowbell! Oh well.

Okay so there are some good songs on the album. Such as the famous "Sex on Fire" (which I'm NOT going to talk about) and "Closer". Closer is incredibly weird but is still awesome. Not much else to say really... mainly because it is one of the few songs on the album that WORKS.

Another thing that pisses me off is the singer's voice. I mean jeez! How bad can it get? As bad as J_____ B_____ (common decency doesn't allow me to mention this name)? Gosh.

Thats really all I have to say on this album. Not much ey. Oh well. The next one will be LOOOOOOOOOONG. I promise.

-Alex