“I was running through the desert / I was looking for drugs / And I was searching for a woman / Who was willing to love / So I could take her like a woman. / Yeah take her like a woman,” confesses Caleb Followill in the first few seconds of “Rock City”.
Most people feel that what has been missing from the band’s music since the early 2000s is the reckless and grungy confessions of alcoholic benders and rock ‘n’ roll sexcapades. They make up for that in this album, with most of the lyrics teeming with tales of drunken and sexual adventures.
Mechanical Bull is like a celebration of Kings of Leon’s first five albums. From their raucous formative Youth and Young Manhood years you can hear “Supersoaker” and “Don’t Matter”, both of which have simple, to-the-point hooks and messy drum lines and guitar chords. From the confused but still solid years between Because of the Times and Only by the Night you get the plaintive “Beautiful War” and “Tonight”, which are not the best songs on the album but are enjoyable in the right mood. Finally, from the less successful Come Around Sundown era there’s “Wait For Me”, a paradoxically successful track with guaranteed lighters-in-the-air concert appeal.
Musically, the album sticks together from start to finish and does so without sounding repetitive and too thematic. Matthew and Jared Followill are the heroes of the record, with guitar skills that lend a broody and hungover atmosphere that every now and then thunders to life with soaring, stadium-filling riffs. Marry that with Caleb’s sometimes-low, sometimes-screamy vocals and you’ve got an album that behaves, if you will, precisely like a true mechanical bull: dangerously fun and unpredictable and certain to leave you on the floor begging for another turn.
Rating: 8/10
