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After the success of their five-time platinum selling album Only By The Night many die-hard fans of the Kings of Leon were worried by the band’s new found mainstream status and bemoaned a new ‘stadium rock’ direction that contradicted their Southern roots. The message seems to have got through to them however and the music video for new single ‘Radioactive’ seems to be intent on showing what down-to-earth, rural hometown boys they still are.

The video is centred around the band visiting a choir of black children in a dilapidated barn somewhere in the Deep South. In 3 minutes 27 seconds the band manage to cover all manner of clichés. We see Caleb and the gang playing football with children in the street, running through sprinklers in the sun, flying kites wistfully, spinning around children we can only presume they met about five minutes before the shoot, and fishing by the riverbank. Just regular guys. There is even a shot of some pies cooling on a check-clothed picnic table. I was half expecting the entire cast of Little House On The Prairie to pop up and organize an egg-and-spoon race, or Caleb to throw down his guitar and deliver a calf.

The whole thing is shot through a yellow lens giving the video a sun-kissed tint and dust kicked up from the ground swirls in every shot as, literally everyone, frolics. It would not have been out of place if the Coca-Cola logo faded in at the end, or the Jack Daniels narrator started explaining the process of aging oak barrels over the top.

Yet while the Kings of Leon have a history of poor music videos their musical back catalogue is almost flawless, and the new single does not disappoint. It was written back in their Aha Shake Heartbreak days so the song has an element of the stripped back indie vibe that characterised their first couple of albums and while emotion feels forced in the video, the chorus of the track is soulful and soars over the wailing guitar.

The choir’s backing vocals in the final chorus work well and that feeling of inextinguishable positivity that comes with gospel music runs through the song. It would have been easy for the band to stick to the chart-pleasing formula of injecting “woahs” and “aaahs” in the chorus like we saw with huge hit ‘Use Somebody’ last year, but they stay away from this and ‘Radioactive’ will come as a comfort to fans who have been there since the beginning. It is a sure fire hit and the Kings of Leon look unstoppable ahead of their eagerly-awaited fifth album Come Around Sundown which is released on October 19th, now they just need to give music video concepts a little more thought.

Christopher Hooton

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