Kings of Leon

“Use Somebody”
from the album Only By the Night
2008
iTunes

Bands lucky enough to make more than a couple of albums usually do one of two things: They make roughly the same record over and over, or they psych themselves out and try to force creative evolution by doing something foolish like, say, banning guitar solos (ahem, Metallica).

There’s a third route, though, and it’s the one Kings of Leon has taken — the natural route.

Instead of pushing themselves to grow beyond the jittery garage-rock sound of its first full-length album, the Tennessee band of three brothers and their cousin simply lit out on tour and let it happen on its own. The results have been apparent on every album since 2004’s Youth & Young Manhood, and never more so than on the band’s latest, Only By the Night.

By the time Kings of Leon released its third album, last year’s excellent Because of the Times, the band had spent much of the previous three years on the road, and it showed in the hints of exhaustion flickering on the edges of songs given to occasional temperamental outbursts. Only By the Night finds a group that has learned to pace itself.

Singer Caleb Followill has never sounded so thoughtful, so knowing, whether he’s assuming the perspective of a desperate man ready to pull his life together on “Cold Desert,” exploring different kinds of relationships on “Crawl” or one particular kind of relationship on “Sex on Fire,” and he sings with greater nuance than the full-on yelp that was his signature in the group’s early days.

The rest of the band gives him plenty of room to work. Jared Followill lays down subtle but relentless bass lines, and Caleb and cousin Matthew Followill build on them with soaring guitar breaks on “Use Somebody,“ fuzzed-out stutters on “Crawl” and crying lead lines on “Revelry.”

It’s the mark of a great band when each new album is better than the one before it, and with Only By the Night, Kings of Leon shows once more just how great a band it has become.