Kings of Le-YAWN

Only By The Night is just a boring album. There are some interesting parts to it and it hits third gear a lot, but it never gets firmly into fourth, let alone fifth or sixth. it just stalls out, repeating the same, crescendo building blandness that i've kind of come to expect from them. I heard their new radio single and thought, okay, that's catchy. There's a few more songs that are sorta catchy, but

1. They don't build on each other
2. They sound really similar
3. They're ultimately musically uninteresting and uninventive
4. They never make that jump to foot tapping, gas-pedal-pushing, finger drumming goodness.
5. Sex on Fire is a voice change away from being an 80's pop hit. Replace the singer with Brian Wilson or Rod Stewart and big hair and tight acid washed jeans with neon scrunchies and tied off bandana's will jump into your head.
   

The album just lacks interesting songs and i can't really recommend it.

Artist: Kings of Leon
Album: Only By the Night
Best Song: Sex on Fire
Overall: 4
Play If You Like: boring music. There, i said it.

Manchester Orchestra

I only heard of Manchester Orchestra this week and i grabbed it off of Amazon (Amazon musical dl's, btw, are about... 1000x better than itunes. Cheaper, no DRM at all (and you don't pay for no DRM) and generally better bit rates. They download just as fast and import automatically. Also, everyone plays nice with Amazon, whereas some folks dont' like playing with Apple's, GIMME GIMME GIMME, model).

Anyway, Manchester Orchestra's Mean Everything to Nothing is "A Triumph", "5 Stars" (Peter Travers) (i made that up, rolling stone didn't review the album as far as i know). It's good. It is a 5 peice (which is interestingly rare these days) that is neither an Orchestra nor from Manchester (discuss, i feelin' fuchlempt). The music has this raw, emotional feel to it that was a little off-putting initially because it felt affected. After a couple of listen-throughs, i think it is just good and true. Maybe that's me projecting, i dunno. Vocalist Andy Hull let's his voice crack and then belts out angry screams and it feels like Bright Eyes with some nut. I dig that. At it's best, MO is loud, angry, raw rock, filled with layered guitars, booming percussions and probably the best "rock-scream" of the Ott's (or however you spell that). At worst, it is Bright Eyes-ee, with some quiet simma-down and the voice cracking. That's a solid "worst" in my book.

Shake it up, The River, I've Got Friends and Everything to Nothing are the best tracks on a front to back good album with good length (and girth) and the disc is about 55 mins in length--a solid showing.

Artist: Manchester Orchestra
Album: Mean Everything to Nothing
Released: 2009
Best Tracks: Shake it up, The River, I've Got Friends and Everything to Nothing
Play if you like: Bright Eyes, Rage, At The Drive-In, Sparta
Rating: 8.9

http://myplay.com/audio_player/myplay/135932/466324/466332?allowBrowsing=1

Been a While

screw that. The Junta is back