Yahoo! Music Review

Gig played on 14/08/08

If someone had suggested, even as their last expectation-nudging album hit the ground strutting, that those quaint indie hicks Kings Of Leon would be playing this 5,000 capacity landmark London venue as a snug festival warm-up (not to mention a precursor to further sold-out shows at Wembley and the O2 enormodome) you'd have called them Russell Grant, given them an obscure 'predictions' show on cable and been done with it.

Stood here now of course, it's easy to read it as having been inevitable all along. Kings have a largely crease free back catalogue, they're not bad looking lads now the beards have gone and frontman Caleb Followill has a voice that simply requires a rock band. But if their calibre has always been akin to sinking shots racked up on a bar, replenished indefinitely, they've never been a group to end up dancing on the tables in full view. They're more likely to be found on the fringes, stock steady, spinning a cocktail stick between their teeth whilst peers fall over their own feet under brighter lights.

As they bust the show open with gargantuan recent download "Crawl" though - a fistful of immense bass groove and looping cascades of guitar - we receive directive that this is probably about to change. Its looming, rhythmic presence throws down the gauntlet to The Verve, who have the misfortune of following them two days later at the V Festival, and there's something more than a little unexpectedly U2 and "Achtung Baby" about its bombast, especially as it reaffirms that boot print live. The Strokes eating barbeque it is not.

Given the palpable excitement tonight, it's a disappointment they don't debut more from forthcoming album "Only By The Night", but the perplexingly titled single "Sex On Fire" does at least oblige the cravings, that feral croak reaching alarming new heights. It stays largely business as usual, but is far from frugal and this new found generosity pays great dividends - see also the arena-slaying reverb avalanche of "Manhattan".

Elsewhere it's direct hits and adoration all the way, "The Bucket", "Knocked Up" and "On Call" literally buckling under the weight of crowd participation. For a brief moment during the latter, Caleb raises his arm and tenses his bicep in recognition of the deafening mass of throat straining accompaniment. It's a worthy enough metaphor for an act that will somehow release their fourth album as one of the world's biggest rock bands.

by James Berry