Today's Pick

Kings of Leon are steady rolling out videos from their 2013 album "Mechanical Bull." This time, the band of brothers strip away the drama and the actors and keeps it simple with a straightforward performance video that they have just released for their song "Temple," the second official and third overall taken from the rock band's sixth studio album, "Mechanical Bull," the band's first album in three years sees the Tennessee rockers attempting to rediscover their early spark, but falling frustratingly short. The yearning "Temple," which sits neatly in the middle of the 11-track release, is perhaps the best thing they've written in five years, and certainly the most effortless.
Self-assured, conventional, and damned if it's not pretty effective, Kings of Leon's "Temple" neatly sums up the strengths of "Mechanical Bull." This song about taking a shot in the head for a prospective lover, was penned in a South African hotel room. "Obviously things changed when we got in the studio, like the intro, but it felt like a '90s song to me," frontman Caleb Followill told Billboard magazine. "That's when we were listening to a lot of music, and still when we play it, we crack up the whole time, this the most radio friendly song..." According to drummer Nathan Followill, the breakdown in the song is the band's ode to Irish rockers Thin Lizzy.
Kings of Leon's confident throwback "Temple" Video. In fact, much of the Paul Greenhouse-directed vintage-style visuals mix with a no-frills performance of "Mechanical Bull" standout, which they've already given on both Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Saturday Night Live. But the song has a "by Mennen" catchiness that the unshowy presentation only boosts. And the lyric about how Caleb would "take one to the temple" is more than a reference to Kings of Leon embedding themselves in some cranial pleasure zone.
Largely washed with a vintage effect, the video was filmed half on nice modern cameras, and half on and old-fashioned hand-held Super 8 camera that makes Instagram filters shiver in their boots to posterize their footage into blurry oblivion. The new clip also serves as a nice homage to the band's hometown of Nashville and is made up of shots of the band playing the song in front of the sign on the album cover giving Caleb plenty of screen time to tell us rather over-romantically that he'd "take one in the temple" for us. Together, they evoke both the reason the Followill clan do this and the old-fashioned pride in craft with which they do it.