By now you’ve most likely heard through some sort of major news outlet that Kings of Leon had to cancel their show in Saratoga Springs, NY yesterday due to an incident on the road. You may have even heard that their drummer, Nathan Followill injured his ribs in a bus accident caused by the driver stopping short to avoid a pedestrian leaving their show in Mansfield, MA the night before. What is not really being reported is that the band made all of the traffic at the Xfinity/Comcast/Tweeter/Great Woods center come to a complete halt for close to a half an hour so they could beat their own show’s traffic and rush their buses up to their hotel in Boston, which is about 25 minutes away. Must have been some hotel, or maybe there were super-models there waiting for them?  Or perhaps they had to quickly fly out to their next gig in…Saratoga, NY? A four hour drive away? With what just happened with Tracey Morgans incident on a bus big rock stars apparently still need to be reminded they are in a moving vehicle. Karma’s a bitch Kings of Leon, but lucky for you I was sent to cover the show not the aftermath.

With that being said I didn’t come to this show to pick on Kings of Leon. Even though I missed the whole KoL boat, (or never really wanted to jump on) before their big mainstream stuff was cut, I don’t go to shows with preconceived notions that the band is pop, or sell-outs. At the end of the day there isn’t any fun in that and I always remind myself how easily I would do just about anything for a giant wad of cash. So I don’t blame anyone for selling out, especially if you were brought up in small town Tennessee, or say Salem, Massachusetts.  Nonetheless, much like my counterparts, I do indeed prefer the earlier material and Kings of Leon,  in the midst of their third leg of the Mechanical Bull tour, broke some of it out. Then they threw in a stellar ode to Boston with a Pixies cover and goddammit almost won me over right before they decided to close the show with some of the cheesiest theatrics they could have chosen.

It’s also worth mentioning that they recruited a few bands to round out a decent triple bill for this third leg. They had up and coming VH1 Artist to Watch, Kongos kicking off the night behind their debut record and break out single, “Come With Me Now,” and Young the Giant as the meat in the middle of your big pop-rock sandwich.  The only thing I can say about these two bands is that they both didn’t seem to have the sound to fill an amphitheater the size of the Xfinity Center, which I think can be a common case for bands recruited for opening slots here. The vocals were too low, guitars were muffled, drums and bass were tooloud. It just wasn’t good, and I almost felt bad for them because they probably played the songs the same way they do every night but it just didn’t relay properly through the soundboard. I thought this would only be the case for the openers but the Kings of Leon sound was the same way. I would put the blame on the venue if I wasn’t there just a few weeks ago listening to a band get totally crisp and clean sound from the giant hanging speakers. I think this is where a lot of the criticism begins with a band like Kings of Leon- people generally don’t feel like they’ve totally paid their dues on the road. They got too big, too fast and abandoned their initial fan-base that put them on the map. So now I’m standing next to a fifty year old lady and a twelve year old girl trying to do my thing so I can actually enjoy the horseshit sound coming out of the speakers.

For the most part I dug in and really enjoyed “The Bucket,” and “Family Tree.” “Pyro” was a welcome treat and then their “play it for the city” cover of the Pixies “Where Is My Mind” totally killed. The giant LED screen behind them had some totally sweet graphics like I’ve never seen before (which they would not let us take pictures of) and for a moment in time I was totally engulfed in their show. They also played twenty-one songs for close to an hour and half which is pretty good considering most headlining bands I’ve seen this summer are playing for about an hour. At one point, Caleb Followell said “Hi, we’re Kings of Leon,” as if they were requesting a reintroduction from me and teasing the basking loyal housewife’s and teeny-boppers. That’s if they could even stay the whole night, because unfortunately when I looked behind me, most of the audience had left about half-way through. That’s just about when they decided to take us for a ride on the cheese-train. Late set they melted down and dumped prop-snow on the crowd, essentially making it snow in August during their balled “Beautiful War.” Yeah, ok I get it, you got some cash and you want to do something interesting for your short-attention spanned audience. It worked; couples engaged, cell phones broke out, hugs and kisses and arms wrapped around one another. For a moment it was sweet, but then again with the cheese: next song Caleb asked people to break out their phones to light up the audience. This is such a typical go-to move for a big band that doesn’t have the material to prompt an audience to do something like this on their own. They started to lose me quickly and the night pretty much ended this way as they eventually had to roll through the pop-single “Use Somebody” complete with a bro-chorus sing along. The encore came back with some energy; “Crawl” was decent, but “Black Thumbnail” was messy. Then, of course, the closed the night with “Sex on Fire” with some spinning WWE fireworks that smoked out the underbelly of the roof.

Now as mentioned before, I am not a hater of Kings of Leon or really any band that tries to cash in on some pop singles. Most of the early parts of this show were great. The props and theatrics are something that’s probably fairly normal from acts like this. However, there is an element that feels Kings of Leon kind of skipped over what I would call paying their dues on the club and mid-sized theatre circuit because they got launched so quickly. My argument lies in the overall sound. How do you show up and play to a crowd this big with shitty sound is beyond me. Then, as I am waiting to drive home, I’m pulled to a stand-still in the parking lot for close to a half an hour, only to see a police escort of the tour buses stream-line pass me. Traffic at an amphitheater show is normal, but this was a stand-still. People were pissed and yelling at the buses, as if the band could hear them. Only later did I hear the news that a pedestrian jumped in front of the bus on the highway and caused the bus to stop short. Really though, if this is a band on their third leg of the tour going from Boston to Saratoga there was no need to rush out of there at the mercy of your fans trying to do the same thing as you. So if Kings of Leon was attempting to try to any sort of re-branding of themselves as a “band of the people” by playing a Pixies cover and breaking out older material, they failed miserably by forgetting that the most important thing you can do to win people over is be with the people. If they really want to do this, maybe they should have a little patience, try a little audience interaction, or downsizing the venue so you can actually fill it with people and hear some vocals and guitar chords. Then again, if you’re Kings of Leon, why the fuck would you want to do that?

Young the Giant