You can’t front an arena rock band if you’re an introvert and Caleb Followill is an introvert. A man of few words, of few movements, unable to lift his and brother Anthony’s band thru sheer willpower or really anything at all, to the hugeness Arena rock demands.
At MSG last night, there were problems with the set but they weren’t really musical. The band had changed from a hard rock band with connections to the South, a modern Black Crowes, to a big sounding arena rock band. And they have the songs to allow them to make the move. So, after the first three songs, Anthony morphs from a pyrotechnic guitarist staking his claim somewhere around Slash, Chris Robinson , Eddie Van Halen – and falls into the band adding his parts to a largish sound. Through the set, Anthony’s move is from a highlight solo on “Crawl” to the muck and bombast of an also pretty good penultimate set “Knocked Up”.
And really, the songs are there: “Knocked Up” and “Fans” off Because Of the Time and maybe six more off Come Around Sundown. So why did I tweet that KOL At MSG was the worst concert I’d seen there since Phil Collins?
Back to Caleb and his indolent band. With two small screens on either side of the stage, a whatever stage set, and a lead singer who just wants to play his songs and be left the fuck alone, they stood there and they played and it was a stupefied arrogant performance.
The set was well paced and a drag at the same time. Have these guys never seen the Stones? Pearl Jam? U2? Have these guys never watched a rock concert: istadium rock it is about communion. There is only three reasons to play MSG
1. To say you’ve arrived
2. Because you’re music needs a huge audience partipation to exist
3. For the bread.
I would go with number one here. When you singalongaMSG with Bruce, you’re singing songs that gain depth from a mass of people. “I believe in the promised land” gains meaning when joined by others. “Gonna have my baby” doesn’t.
In a word (o fifty)r it isn’t even that KOL we’re boring, they were simply completely wrong. They shouldn’t be doing this. They are the definition of an opening band who got lucky. They look like they need a wash, they move little, insulated on a huge stage they don’t take advantage of, they neither reach out to the audience nor each other. Fuck, I saw Kaiser Chiefs here and they could em a thing or two. And Caleb’s few words connect exactly once: “I’m gonna get drunk up here because that’s what I do” he says at one point. Apparently, he is a morose drunk.
So what you got for your slim 90 minutes was, as Helen Bach said to me, a bar band. And not a good bar band: you keep on waiting for KOL to understand there position and reposition the set for the audience and they don’t.
The remind me of Oasis, another bad live band with good songs. Liam once said something like “we’re on stage and we’re playing the songs, what the fuck else dya want us to do”.
If you wanna communicate on a big stage with a huge audience, you have to reach out to your audience and draw them in. You have to open up your songs, you have to open up your hearts. You can’t do what Oasis claimed you can: you can’t stand there and say, come to me around sundown.
We won’t go.
I left before the encore.
And I hated King Of Leon because all the pigeon crap, drive by limo, arrogance you read about KOL on rock nyc is unmistable on stage. They don’t know what they’re doing.