When listening to music I often wonder how the same track must appear to those who see the riffs, rhythm and beat as colour. Sadly, the sixth studio album from Kings of Leon has left me in no doubt about its hue; it would be beige.

I can’t help but wonder where the Kings of old have disappeared to. Gone is the ironic posturing of ‘Four Kicks’, the aggression of ‘Red Morning Light’ (surely in contention for the greatest opener to any album, ever) or the unworldly majesty of ‘Closer’. These are replaced instead with blandness incarnate. This is typified by the lyric ‘Don’t make a scene dear’: more of an alternative Michael Winner catchphrase than an anthem...

Despite promotional material promising a return to the raw energetic brilliance of Youth and Young Manhood, Mechanical Bull falls well short. It's inoffensive single ‘Supersoaker’ is surely destined for the ignominy for Radio 2 playlists in years to come. The best song, by far, is 'Temple': its thrashing introduction and Caleb’s angsty lyrics invoke the Kings’ grimier roots, but even this effort seems half-hearted, the final two minutes copying the preceding two more or less exactly.

The whole record suffers from a lack of vigour but even on an album of limp offerings ‘Beautiful War’ is truly terrible, sounding like a ballad passed over by Westlife for being too bloodless, while ‘Wait for Me’ imploring "Wait for me/ It’s all better now" could actually be designed to induce long-term Kings of Leon fans into a nervous breakdown.

As the album plods on the track names seem to promise an improvement. ‘Comeback Story’ ends that hope with the platitude substituted for lyric ‘I’ll walk a mile in your shoes/ Then I’ll be a mile away/ And I’ve got your shoes’, while ‘Coming Back Again’ does it with ‘You got me on the ropes’. I wish they’d just stayed where they were. Final track ‘On The Chin’ is the audible equivalent of the band limping over the finishing line, exhausted from the effort of dragging its far weightier back-catalogue behind it.

Mechanical Bull is in fact a very apt title; the band themselves offered a pithier description of its contents than I ever could.