Pitchfork: Kings of Leon Tour Europe This Summer

Kings of Leon Tour Europe This Summer
Food tasters of Leon hover nervously by sketchy buffalo wings tray

I leapt from oblivion in the summer of '79, ten years to the day after the first moon landing. Bryan Adams' first real six-string was ten years into its dreamtime iconography, becoming battered and falling out of tune. Punk was already ossified and giving way to a more mannered and palatable sort of rebellion, a pinned and zippered "fuck off" sanitized for the legions of cultural dilettantes slumming for a new idiom. Life in general felt somehow like pornography, canned funk chords rolling behind even the most sacrosanct rituals and instances of genuine humanity, as the feel-good sounds of the 70s bled into the flinty-eyed mercantilism of the 80s, never to be heard again.

Or so I thought, until, nearly 25 years later, Kings of Leon emerged with a magic bucket in which Tom Petty smoked hash with Steppenwolf; in which Neil Young traded bright tones with The Kinks; in which long hair, bushy mustaches, and little round tinted glasses shone like fata morgana; in which being Southern (or being Brits pretending to hail from the American South) was a banner of pride not yet torn to shreds by the pelting sleet of edgy East Coast cynicism. That magic bucket, friends, was called Holy Roller Novocaine, an EP that filled many an English heart with gladness and many an NME column inch with overawed acclaim. If The Darkness can make early Foreigner sound cool again, then why can't Kings of Leon do the same for CCR? Beware of ironically requesting "Freebird" at any of the following dates; they might actually play it:

06-25 Glastonbury, England - Glastonbury Fest
07-03 Roskilde, Denmark - Roskilde Fest
07-10 Eire, Ireland - Oxygen Festival
07-11 Kinross, Scotland - T in the Park
07-20 Nyon, Switzerland - Paleo Festival
07-22 Nimes, France - Amphitheater
07-25 Carhaix, France - Les Vielles Charrues
08-06 Bericassim, Spain - TBA
08-07 Koln, Germany - Haldern Festival
08-13 Erfurt, Germany - Erfurt Festival
08-14 Taubertal, Austria - Frequency Festival
08-20 Pukkelpop, Belgium - Pukkelpop Festival
08-21 Chelmsford, England - V Festival
08-22 Stafford, England - V Festival
08-26 Wiesen, Austria - Two Days a Week Festival