Credit: Found On Internet

I can’t help it – when I play this record I can’t help but hear echoes of U2. Not in negative way, but you know when you’re walking down a busy street and you think you hear someone shout your name, only to turn round and no-one did? And then everyone in the street is looking at you like you’re a psycho? That’s what I feel like when I hear the U2 in this record.

This sounds so much bigger than either “Youth & Young Manhood” or “Aha Shaped Heartbreak”. Part of this must be awareness that they’re just playing much bigger venues now. The guitars still have the Tennessee twang that gave the Kings their redneck-cool, but they’ve been made to sound simply enormous, like a Kansas tornado. Caleb Followill’s voice still sounds like Cletus The Yokel smoothed by a gallon of honey, and more the better for it. It’s still one of the most recognisable and engaging voices that’s burst out of America and into the mainstream for years.

They’re not short on balls either – opening the album with “Knocked Up” (the first sign of the U2-isms, just listen and tell me I’m wrong), a seven-minute story about pregnancy, abortion and lovers eloping, this isn’t the traditional way to open a record, but it works. But that’s just the hook that the Kings use to snare the listener – the songs sound familiar from the first listen, but without sounding like mere derivative of classic songs.

“Charmer” sounds like Pixies would if they went up to live in the wilderness and took to drinking nothing but moonshine. It growls like a feral dog. “Black Thumbnail” is similarly unapologetic, throwing its head back, and throwing itself into the business of delivering a chunky uppercut. It sounds like the kind of record Billy Gibbons would love to make if he was a young man today.

The sound of the early Kings come back with “True Love Way” – if Brian May was brought in to flick out the riff. It’s almost too huge, too overwrought, too bombastic to work, but in the end it’s just too damn demanding to be ignored. Coupled with “Fans”, a feelgood rock’n’roll road movie soundtrack of a song, and the blues’d-out basis of the Kings’ success is still abundant in its presence.