First of all, good news for the organizers, who have been badly hit recently: the open-air concert in the imposing cauldron of the Berlin Waldbühne on Wednesday evening (May 31) is almost sold out. Rock am Ring in the Eifel and Rock im Park in Nuremberg can come …
The rows of seats are already filled to the brim with fluffy gossip pop rock with the former school band Giant Rooks from Hamm. A cross-generational and cross-gender audience dressed in Chucks and functional jackets is not deterred by the bratwurst and beer prices (6.50 euros) and clearly enjoys the joy of this early summer (Southern) rock party evening.
In contrast to their Ü75 colleagues from the early days of pop, the brothers Caleb, Jared, Nathan and Matthew Followill, who come from a US itinerant preacher family, are still young hoppers around 40; but at least they’ve been around for over 20 years with well-hung emo stuff. The US retro rock generation of the early noughties.
As is well known, their over-hit “Sex on Fire” recently broke the one-billion mark on the streaming giant Spotify and the band found new target groups beyond their original fan base at the time of the debut album with the great title “Youth & Young Manhood” (2003 ) bestows. In the Waldbühne this cracker is used during the encore. Grande finale, everyone is gripped or jumping. A “Feel Good” break without ego trips and experiments. Rock’n’Roll as a service.
To get in the mood, the canned song “Love Will Tears Apart” by Joy Division sounds and nostalgic snippets from the early days of KoL flicker on the LED screens. Their so-called “breakthrough album” Only By The Night was released in 2008 and the times when singer and mastermind Caleb Followill left the stage in the middle of a concert in a kind of punk rock gesture is now more than a decade long ago. This incident happened while he was drunk in July 2011. “Hate fucking Caleb, not us!” Jared is said to have called out to the raging Dallas crowd at the time. A furor that one can hardly imagine on this extremely conciliatory Waldbühne evening.
The usual lazy KoL singer, with his concisely pressed voice, at least knows that he is playing “one evening in Berlin”. Nice here! He mumbles to two more shows in Germany in a denim jacket, ribbed undershirt and trucker mustache.
“Then it’s back home and we’ll work on new music for you to hear next time.” In recent months, Kings of Leon have canceled the deal with their longtime record label Sony Music. So also on business to new shores after “When You See Yourself” from 2021. Although “new” for the Kings should mean “no experiments”. Halt variations on their tried and tested mid-tempo sing-along anthems.
The program of their European guest performances is a mix of tracks from their eight albums, with an emphasis on “Damals”. Early songs like “Molly’s Chambers” or “Back Down South” warm the heart and give old and new KoL heads the good feeling of being presented with a good job.
You don’t have to go as far as the online colleagues from RBB, who diagnosed “professional listlessness” in their Waldbühnen review. Caleb Fallowill’s “messing up individual guitar lines”, who looked blissfully sedated up close, can also be interpreted as residual rock’n’roll in the otherwise thoroughly choreographed performance of guitar solos and lower pump basses .
Kings Of Leon are still alive would be a conclusion. One more wise recommendation:
It would just be nice to cook up the flat synth sauce that they poured over their more recent anthems a little less thickly on the upcoming album. As a pious wish, also for the stage program of the future: a retro return to more gnarly southern rock would be fragrant.
So there is “Southern States sound with everything” live in West Berlin. And at the end the cell phone lights sparkle brightly in the wide rows of wooden benches…