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“I think people tend to expect a certain sound from us,” says Kings of Leon’s drummer Nathan Followill, “but on this record, we tried to throw them for a loop.”

I feel like this is just a pretty-bow way to say, "we're doing watered down rock anthems and love songs with the words 'I love you' now". All I ever hear is we tried new things, we took it to the next level blah blah blah ... but I just heard the first hi-fi track available and all I'm hearing is nothing that I want to hear. This is not about wanting them to do 'Aha Shake Heartbreak II' as they mention in the article. Aha Shake Heartbreak was completely different from Y&YM but it still rocked-and-you-don't-stop. So far all the tracks I've heard just seem like echoes of the pain & the energy that bled together to form their previous (diverse) sounds. With "On Call" as an example, Caleb sings about how he's bound to this girl, which previously would've been drenched in desperation. Now it's just speech. Also, musically - godammit I always forget this word, but it's just so graduated and it fits into clean lines & everything that was there is still there (solos & all) but they all follow the cues now. They are just echoes! And if this is the first single, I'm guessing they think this is the song to sell the album. Yikes. But still, I am going to hear this album before I write it off. I thought 2006 + 2007 would be excellent years for music but so far they've just represented the watering down of music I love - except for Akron of course! :)

It would have been easy for Kings of Leon to make Aha Shake Part II and call it a day. That album (along with its predecessor, 2003’s Youth and Young Manhood) transformed these sons of a Pentecostal minister, who grew up traveling with the preacher around the rural Deep South, into indie stars in the U.S. and major rock stars in the UK. In 2005, Harp magazine called Kings of Leon “the freshest breeze to blow through the modern music scene since punk rock turned everything upside down and inside out in the late ’70s.”

“On the last night of the Dylan tour,” Caleb says, “Dylan came into our dressing room and he says [here Caleb affects Dylan’s husky rasp:] ‘What’s that last song you guys played?’ And I said, ‘Uh, it’s called ‘Trani’ [a little ditty about transvestite hookers from the first album]. And Dylan goes, ‘That’s a hell of a song.’ “I think that was pretty much the biggest thrill of my entire life.”

Dylan knows his shit!