Why the Kings of Leon are the Best Band Ever (this week)…

I have always subscribed to the theory that music, and more particularly pop music, is a lot like wine.  It might be easy to say that both music and wine require an acquired taste, but this is putting it a little too easy.  Wine connoisseurs, I imagine, can go into a number of qualities of wine which make a really good wine, the consistency, the aroma, and on and on.  I certainly don’t know the ins and outs of wine; I’ll leave that to the wine connoisseurs.

I can tell you that for somebody who has never had a sip of wine, a glass of the finest red wine is like placing pearls before swine.  A novice wine drinker likely does not have the ability to distinguish the different aspects of the wine let alone know what they are.  For a novice, one glass of wine is likely indistinguishable from another.  You could place in front of the novice a glass if plunk released this year, and it would taste the same as a fine wine released in a golden year.

Recently, I was scrolling through a number of albums that I bought and uploaded to my Google music account.  A set of albums I bought during a time I was discovering music through television commercials was ones released by the Kings of Leon.  It was the song “Molly’s Chamber” played in the background of a car commercial was sold me on the band initially.  The commercial featured two young adults, a man and a woman, who you got the impression were either newlyweds or at the very least a couple having a grand old time in various different places, jumping around like that there was no tomorrow.

This was a time when the Kings of Leon were relatively unknown though I had seen a short segment on them on Mtv discussing their roots and influence.  I bought the first album, Youth and Young Manhood, and became instantly a fan.  I can say that it was not the rock sound that they played which had me sold.  I like the lyrics of their songs, but that wasn’t quite the hook that suckered me in. 

No, it was the voice of the lead singer, Anthony Caleb Fallowill, which drew me in and held on.  It’s the kind of voice like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, gravelly, rough, like all the soreness of life had seeped into his insides and the only release was through his vocal chords.  If “Molly’s Chamber” had convinced me to buy Youth and Young Manhood, the song “Joe’s Head” made me a junky, and, for several months, I listened to that song at least once a day. 

And then I bought Because of the Times, and my heart broke like everyone else’s when I heard the first track, “Knocked Up,” a testament to the working class roots of the band, It was a simple song about two young lovers, the product of their love a child which apparently someone, a parent I suppose, was threatening to give away.  The beat drove the song, but it was quiet, subdued, adding to the tragic feeling evoked by the words, i.e., “I am going to keep my baby.”

I loved the two albums I had bought.  I discovered two other albums were released by the Kings of Leon, Aha Shake Heartbreak and Only by the Night, and I bought them too believing that you could never have too much of a good thing, relying on the product that the Kings of Leon had already released.  And yet, I discovered that these albums didn’t live up to my expectations. 

I am not quire sure why I didn’t like them as much.  There is something to be said about an album being over produced, and certainly the album Only by the Night seemed over produced, too clean cut.  The quality of Caleb’s voice seemed to disappear as if someone had smoothed it, told him to sing more clearly.  It became filtered so that I couldn’t detect the sorrow that I detected in earlier albums.  Add upon that the songs felt generic to me, with nothing to stand out, nothing that broke away from the conventional rock song. 

So I placed them on the shelf, wrote off the purchases as a loss and moved on to other bands whom at that time I thought were more deserving of my time. 

But then I pulled the albums off the shelves again, or, at least put the albums back into rotation on my music player.  It is funny how time seems to erase initial impressions.  As we mature and accumulate experiences which temper much which we perceive including what we hear, music that we found to be bland or boring before gains some significance and depth.  And that is what happened to me with the Kings of Leon. 

I suppose that I wanted the dirty, gritty songs of Youth and Young Manhood to be repeated in the subsequent albums.  I wanted Caleb Anthony Fallowill to continue to be incomprehensible as he sings about the woman who had done him wrong and his wielding of pistol as a result, the revenge killing for a cheating lover.  But that was not who the Kings of Leon are, or not entirely. 

There is something to be said of the subtly of Mr. Fallowill’s voice, it is still gritty and dirty, holds that pain, but now subtly so, so that while the words his sings are cleaner, comprehensible, the emotion is still contained in them.  It is like that fine wine, aged over time, hard to distinguish the one characteristic in it that makes it good, requiring a certain amount of experience to not only to detect it but to appreciate it.