KEY POINTS:
By rights, the novelty should be wearing off by now. After all, Kings of Leon arrived not only with one of 2003's best albums on debut Youth and Young Manhood, but with the band biography of that year - the group's three Followhill young brothers (joined by a
cousin) raised on the road by their father, a defrocked southern preacher.
But then they quickly matched the first outing with 2004's Aha Shake Heartbreak, a less southern-fried affair than the first on which they increasingly embraced various post-punk/new wave/New York influences without turning into the Strokes.
And now comes the third, a brilliant album that's both a logical progression and great leap forward.
Yes, - on second track Charmer - it might well include a Pixies rip-off so blatant that we're thinking of using it as a prank on TimeOut's resident Pixies aficionado. But so was Smells Like Teen Spirit. And Charmer fires its Monkey Gone To Heaven fuzz-rockets with perfect timing.
They come right after the extended languid start of Knocked Up. On that one Caleb Followhill sings the lament of a man whose preggers girlfriend is beside him in his Coup deVille as they skip town over music which suggests U2's Edge sending out harmonics to get through Springsteen's' Darkness on the Edge of Town (or is that Tunnel of Love?).
That track and others like On Call deliver Because of the Times' first big surprise - it's full of space, echoes and atmosphere, not the dry, rough and ready approach of its predecessors.
They've had enough of the garage and now the Kings sound positively epic and psychedelic in places, and rhythmically disarming in others.
That's whether it's the towering McFearless, the or the heat-haze desertscapes suggested by Trunk, or the closing Arizona. They're chucking in rocky reggae with unembarrasing results on Raggo, twitchy new wave riffs on the vocoder-assisted My Party and on the beginning of Black Thumbnail they provide a valiant answer to that burning question: What if Creedence Clearwater Revival had just been a little more dub?
That's before it hits its howling chorus, just one moment of many that proves Kings of Leon still rocks like the last gang in town too, especially when they're damning Tom Petty's torpedoes on Fans or hotwiring another car on Camaro.
Caleb's lyrics (mostly about sex or the lack thereof) remain as idiosyncratic as on previous outings, the almost English-as-a-second-language delivery as appealingly off-kilter as ever. While his hookline screech on the aforementioned Charmer contains frequencies only to be heard by neighbourhood cats and Pixie Frank Black's lawyers.
It's just one disarming moment of many on an album that may well be the making of Kings of Leon from crit-rock outfit to something far more important. A crowning achievement.
Label: RCA
Verdict: Southern weirdo rock clan deliver album of their career
