Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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Kings of Leon¶
402 words on Music
Kings of Leon seem to be one of the newer hypes in music. Particularly for those of us who like music from the 1970s.
But it's a bit odd. They seem to get quite a lot of press coverage for being quite a new band, they even have a – mostly empty – German website for reasons beyond my comprehension. While I like the music, this feels a little too much to be good. All that hype coming, everyone uniformly describing them as 'bearded' (scary!) and 'young' to coincide with the Youth and Young Manhood title, I suppose.
Usually it's much nicer to slowly 'discover' a band by yourself, finding their record in the store or by word-of-mouth propaganda and compilation CDs from friends, rather than them turning up virtually out of nowhere. Another consequence of this is that you could hear raving reviews at a time when I couldn't pick up the album in my local record store. Which of course led me to get a copy off the internet for the time being.
Can't they simply ship albums (and films for that matter) to everyone at the same time? Surely that would solve a lot of the so-called 'piracy' problems. If people anticipate and want something, it's usually helpful to make sure they can buy it at that very moment. Musical woes come and go. If I am supposed to be a consumer who buys a lot of thing without thinking about it, then please make sure I can get what I want when I want it. I may have changed my mind next week.
And as far as I am concerned, there don't need to be any preview releases for the press. Personally, I don't suffer if an album makes it to the store before I see anything written about it. Actually I may have the joy to discover it myself before it's been discussed to death. And with media becoming more and more real-time reviews should start coming in pretty soon after albums are released anyway.
Favourite tracks are Joe's head and Genius, which is number 7. I saw the video of Molly's Chambers on telly. Bad choice of a song. The record's cover looks like a mix of one of the Queen covers mixed with the back side of Led Zeppelin records.
In short: I like the music, I despise the marketing. No news here.
