Preaching to the converted

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 31, 2004 | by Leon McDermott

Faster (1994) A pained scream which encapsulates all the intellectual rage and existential agonies of life, Faster is a juggernaut of verbiage, spat out by a Nietzschian ubermensch disgusted by us mere mortals. Plath, Pinter and Henry Miller are all dismissed in the chorus, deemed to have fallen by the wayside.

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (1995) They'd already proved that they could do bitter, angry and desolate; on this cover version of the Bacharach/David classic (donated to the WarChild charity album Help), they revealed their vulnerable side.

A Design For Life (1996) The first single to be released after the disappearance of Richey Edwards, and the cornerstone of their fourth album, Everything Must Go. A miniature elegy to the working-class miners of Wales that were sold out by Thatcher, it's driven by a sense of righteous anger, as well as the band coming to terms with the disappearance of the man who defined their identity.

kings of leon aha shake heartbreak (hand me down) 3/5

EVERY band needs a good mythology, and Kings Of Leon have constructed one which seems almost tailor-made for parody. Four members of the same family (three brothers and their cousin) who play down and dirty blues rock, raised like good ole Southern evangelists, lived on the back seat of a car for a while their debut album may as well have come with a stick to whittle while you listen. Thankfully, however, this follow-up to Youth And Young Manhood has a little more substance than their one-note debut. Their developing sound is a relief, especially as The Strokes - to whom the Kings are often compared - came back with a second album that sounded almost identical to their first.

Lyrically, they're as base as you'd expect four late-teens and early 20-somethings to be; on Taper Jeans Girl and Soft, Caleb Followill sounds like a priapic but thwarted fratboy, eager and useless at the same time. What saves him from sounding like a jerk, however, is both his versatile voice - he can switch from gnarly and decrepit to frail and wounded in a second - and the quality music.

Razz sounds like a ska-tinged soundtrack to a back-alley knife fight, while Day Old Blues is a quietly strummed wonder and features perhaps the only instance of yodelling that isn't a crime against music. If they can keep expanding their sound, Kings Of Leon could one day grow into a fine band. Or they could grow back their beards and turn into the new ZZ Top.

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Day Old Blues Travis singles (independiente) 4/5

EVERYONE loves Travis. They're the consummate underdogs, the men who did; the band that seem to have held on to sanity while becoming hugely famous. It's almost - but not quite - enough to make you hate them. They're the guys next door who just happen to have sold millions, and let's face it, who wants nice rock stars?

Travis are pretty much impossible to hate, however, and this singles collection is a pretty thorough demonstration as to why. The singles from their last album 12 Memories lag somewhat, and the drippy Flowers In The Window ought to be bagged up and ditched in the Clyde, but new single Walking In The Sun is proof that they still haven't forgotten how to write a soaring, Byrds-ian chorus. There's also Coming Around, the standalone single which came out between their breakthrough album The Man Who and its near-twin The Invisible Band.