Growing Up in Public
Nashville’s Kings of Leon come of age channeling ’70s rock, Southern-style
by Lacey Galbraith
Kings of Leon
Youth and Young Manhood (RCA)
It’s been three months since the Kings of Leon released their first full-length album, Youth and Young Manhood, yet the furor surrounding them is as loud as ever. Open any number of magazines and there they are, staring out in that vacant, new rock-star way, their barely postadolescent frames and boyish faces still evident through the vintage clothes and long hair. Their sound is heavily infused with those beariven rock rhythms of the ’70s, and recently they’ve gone on tour with The Strokes. You can practically hear the sighs of a thousand hipsters.
Part of the intrigue that surrounds the Kings of Leon derives from their story, which is almost so Southern as to border on myth. Comprised of three brothers—Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill—and a cousin, Matthew, they spent much of their childhood on the road, following their father, an itinerant Pentecostal preacher, from one church to another. They had little contact with or knowledge of pop culture and, at the time, knew more about gospel and Al Green than they did about the Velvet Underground or the Rolling Stones.
They became an almost clannish bunch, and though this familial closeness adds much to their mystique, it legitimately defines the Kings of Leon as a band. “They have this great sibling harmony thing happening,” says Angelo, their mentor and the co-writer of all 11 songs on Youth and Young Manhood. “It’s a chemistry. The family thing...is a huge part of who they are and the way they relate, the way they play together. It can’t but help, I think, have some outcome in what they’re doing.”
The Kings of Leon sound is tight and hard, and Caleb’s rough-edged vocals are far from slick or overproduced. There’s the mix of the secular and the holy in his voice, at times loud and exhortative, at others moaning and half-full of ecstasy. There’s a distinct energy to the band, and perhaps this is what people are responding to.
The Kings are often described as “the Southern Strokes,” but it’s only because their music has that same edgy, retro feel. Their beats are inexorable, and though they’re not necessarily breaking ground musically, they are giving off a vibe—one that’s definitely that of a company of young men, cocksure and on the prowl—and the intensity can be thrilling. It’s why their live shows are so good; they not only sound like they do on the album—full-on and heedless—there’s also little distance between them and their audience. The Kings of Leon aren’t playing a postmodern rock ’n’ roll with ironic stances and muddled meanings, and that’s where all those years in church come into play. They know that to proselytize, you must be accessible; you must try to get right down into the middle of it all.
The Kings of Leon are very much a Southern band, which helps explain why they’re often compared to Lynyrd Skynyrd, with whom they share a penchant for long hair and mustaches. The Kings, however, are bluesier than Skynyrd—they’re gritty, like a good Southern gothic novel, and fittingly, many of their songs are narratives, full of strange characters and vivid imagery. In “Joe’s Head,” a man confesses to just having killed his girlfriend and her on-the-side lover; in “Holy Roller Novocaine,” biblical references compete with Caleb’s dark vocals to tell the firserson seductions of a preacher and one of his parishioners.
Perhaps the biggest gripe against the band, at least in Nashville, is that unlike other local artists who’ve spent time playing in the clubs and bars around town, the Kings of Leon have never taken part in any rock scene here. Indeed, they more closely resemble Athena emerging fully formed from Zeus’ head than they do Nashville mainstays like Josh Rouse or Will Kimbrough. In fact, many of their detractors argue that they’re a manufactured product, one that in the beginning was being shopped around as a country duo consisting of just Caleb and Nathan, rather than the rock band they are today.
At first, it was only Caleb and Nathan who were signed as writers/artists, but as Angelo points out, “They were just so young. They really hadn’t formed their thing yet. It was probably like anybody else. If they had been in the middle of the country somewhere, they would be in their garage figuring it out. They just happened to be here.... I think they were originally getting pushed to get into country, and they were like, 'We don’t feel this.’ They had a vision of their music before they had their band. They knew what they wanted to do. That’s why they went to their brother and their cousin.”
To a certain extent, Angelo is right. The group are young, which partly accounts for why their music is so impassioned—you can almost hear them discovering, then channeling, the guitar licks and vocal swaggers of a band like the Rolling Stones. But what next? A title like Youth and Young Manhood suggests that age when a boy is on the cusp, when he must step away from the people who taught and influenced him and become something more. Whether the Kings of Leon will create something of their own—something that harnesses all that energy, all that talent and enthusiasm—is yet to be seen.
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