If Kings of Leon were movie directors, Aha Shake Heartbreak would be the technicolour, widescreen follow-up to their monochrome, one dimensional debut. Not that there was anything fundamentally wrong with Youth And Young Manhood. Not by a long stretch. Their brand of southern fried antipentecostal beardy white boy feel-good rant ‘n’ roll struck a chord with the noughties’ disenfranchised youth, high on the happy side and waiting with baited breath for the next Noo Yawk moment to arrive. Instead of the Big Apple, however, they got some stranger fruit, courtesy of these sun-frazzled different Strokes.
Of course, it helped that they came packaged like a marketing guru’s wet dream: three brothers and a cousin – check. Sons of a bible belt preacher – check. Unorthodox upbringing, travelling from church to church in the back of a van – check. Learned their instruments by playing gospel standards of a Sunday – check. Turned their back on the Lord, embraced the Divil’s music, grew big ZZ Top-lovin’ beards, developed some big hair and wrote perfectly driven three minute fuzz-pop songs about fast lives and faster women. It didn’t hurt that behind the hair there lurked some seriously pretty boys who looked fucking amazing on the covers of magazines.
The suspicion remained, at least with this music lover, that their day in the sun would be short-lived, that the fun lovin’ country boys just happened upon the zeitgeist by virtue of some benign serendipity and that they’d slink off back to the muddled America that spawned them. Boy was I wrong.
Aha Shake Heartbreak is brimming over with the kind of ballsy riffs and joyous noise that I imagined could only happen if Angus and Malcolm Young were to convene with Keith Moon, Marc Boland and Cliff Burton in the bar at the end of the universe. This is the sound of four young men wringing every last sweaty riff from the rock ‘n’ roll dream and loving almost every minute of it.
At 35 minutes, this album barely introduces itself, let alone leaves you its phone number, but by the time closing track ‘Rememo’ fades, it still leaves the listener feeling fulfilled and satiated. It’s also full of the sleaziest couplets this side of a hip-hop anthem, but they’re delivered with more of a cheeky wink than world-weary misogynistic scorn (‘Soft, Slow Night, So Long’).
From the hand-clapping sassiness of ‘King Of The Rodeo’ to the air-guitar defying ‘Pistol Of Fire’ and the cymbal-ic majesty of ‘Four Kicks’, it is impossible to listen to this album without at least one bodily organ gyrating in time with the deep-fried southern boogie. ‘Milk’ starts like a plaintive, throat-scorched plea to a former lover, but soon mutates into another hip-swinging march, while current single ‘The Bucket’ is the most joyous three minutes of teen rock star angst that you’re likely to hear this year.
The Followill boys owe a huge debt of gratitude to producer team Ethan Johns and Angelo, as they have managed to help their blues-driven southern gothic rock ‘n’ stroll to flower into a multi-dimensional aural delight, fleshing out their four-to-the-floor bad boy boogie into something far more interesting, but no less arresting. ‘Day Old Blues’ is a prime example, building from a tear and whiskey-stained dashboard confessional (“Girls are gonna love the way I toss my hair/ Boys are gonna hate the way I seem”) into a whoopingly cathartic chorus without seeming studied or unnatural.
Rock kids were always going to love this album, but the family Followill may just have invited the great washed into the party. As Caleb asks on the opening ‘Slow Night So Long’, “Rise and shine all you gold digging mothers/ Are you too good to tango with the poor poor boys?” Rock ‘n’ roll gold.