Post by jiffy on Sept 24, 2004 16:13:34 GMT
Whilst avoiding work (its 5 on a Friday, for crying out loud) I did something useful and found a lovely article about someone falling in love with KOL. Sorry, I tried to edit it down to the full-on KOL moments, but it's still a bit long. I s'pose love can be like that sometimes...
"And Now, a Less Informed Opinion Posted by: aday on Monday, April 12, 2004 - 01:01 PM (it's from Spin online)
Inside the scruffy awesomeness of Kings of Leon
By Dave Eggers
2. The rest of this piece is about Kings of Leon and driving around Somerset….
At a rest stop halfway between London and Somerset, we stopped to get food and look at people. The people were large, as are most people at rest stops the world over. Our rental car had a CD player, but we packed no CDs; luckily, this rest stop, in addition to offering strange rides for small children, had a convenience store with sodas, Kylie Minogue calendars–true–and a rack of CDs for sale. The prices were murder–something like $120 a CD, I think, but my math is not good–so we bought only two: a Beach Boys collection and the debut by Kings of Leon.
I want to say that this album has the best title conceived in my lifetime. The nine runner-up spots are all occupied by Guided by Voices, but No. 1 is Youth & Young Manhood by Kings of Leon–it’s so bold and plain that it could only have been begotten without guile by people who wouldn’t know why anyone would find it funny. It’s unaffected and sincere, as is the album, which is one of the chief reasons I think this, right now, is the best period in the last 15 years for people who like music made with guitars and drums and voices.
My hander-down of music that he’s found and that I pluck like low-hanging fruit, is my younger brother, who after many years of receiving the great bountiful benefit of my taste and expertise is now my primary lifeline to all that is good and new. His hand-me-ups are the reason I knew to buy Kings of Leon, and the reason I believe that they should be, as a group but functioning as one, elected governor of Tennessee. And that the Detroit Cobras should be put in charge of NASA and all current and future international space stations. And that the Libertines and the Elected should replace the royal families of Norway and Denmark. And that Desaparecidos should be given unlimited access to all the world’s high-speed trains and monorails and to as much gold bullion as they can carry.
3. So we played Youth & Young Manhood about 11 times in the course of that three-hour drive from London to coastal Wales and ten more on the way back to the London airport. This is one of the best and most American albums the U.S. has produced in years, and there’s nothing as good as listening to something so American while driving through the English countryside. The English countryside really looks the way the English countryside is supposed to look. It’s tidy, the roads are narrow, the greens are very green, and the roadsides aren’t polluted with billboards and gas stations. There are stone walls and pubs with names like the Thirsty Lion Killer and the Tipsy Barmaid. It’s all so neat and just-so that when you put on Kings of Leon, you feel like you’re defiling everything you pass, that the sloppiness of the sound and Caleb’s growly, scatty voice will somehow erode the landscape like a quick-moving glacier or an inland monsoon. You picture the band, the three Followill brothers–Caleb, Nathan, Jared–and their cousin Matthew, you see their long filthy hair and their mustaches, and their aura is so specific to a time and place in America that you want to drop them all on England’s pristine green countryside like a big, round, ugly American culture bomb.
The Followills and their videos look like they were made in the ’70s. The videos are grainy and clumsy, or are designed to look that way. They appear to have been filmed at a low-budget KOA campground in Tennessee. Everyone’s in T-shirts and bad jeans worn without smirks. The extras look like poor kids and fast kids, the kind who wear their shorts too high and tight with striped tube socks under their Walgreens-bought sandals. I have been to these types of campgrounds–not pretty, not clean, the Porta Potties stinking of lime and feces–and these campgrounds are Kings of Leon, and Kings of Leon are these campgrounds. Kings of Leon are two-door muscle cars and Piggly Wigglies and racist uncles and upholstery that stinks of smoke and signs on the inside of junior-high locker doors that say Cocaine Adds Life because that’s such a badass naughty pun.
Kings of Leon are motorboats on crowded lakes and waterskiing in cutoffs and hiding Milwaukee’s Best in the forest, in the snow, in January, because your parents caught on that you were keeping cases in the fridge in the garage. Kings of Leon are knowing a guy in juvie and having a cousin who’s been in jail twice. And that cousin, by the way, the one with the burns all over his right forearm–nothing interesting, just an accident with coffee–that cousin, Terry, would love Kings of Leon if he gave them a chance. You would, Terry. No, Terry, there aren’t any guitar solos or power ballads, but otherwise you have got to understand these guys, you have to own these guys, my man! No, Terry, they don’t really sound like the Strokes meet the Allman Brothers. Anyone who says they sound like the Allman Brothers is nuts. Would a member of Kings of Leon marry Cher? I just don’t think so, my incarcerated friend. Kings of Leon are the real deal, and I can’t describe them any better because it’s starting to seem like math, and this, as you know, causes me pain. Just listen to them a few dozen times–you have the time, I think–and you’ll know of what I speak.
I have no ending for this column. You know what was a pretty good movie? Tron. "
This man KNOWS
"And Now, a Less Informed Opinion Posted by: aday on Monday, April 12, 2004 - 01:01 PM (it's from Spin online)
Inside the scruffy awesomeness of Kings of Leon
By Dave Eggers
2. The rest of this piece is about Kings of Leon and driving around Somerset….
At a rest stop halfway between London and Somerset, we stopped to get food and look at people. The people were large, as are most people at rest stops the world over. Our rental car had a CD player, but we packed no CDs; luckily, this rest stop, in addition to offering strange rides for small children, had a convenience store with sodas, Kylie Minogue calendars–true–and a rack of CDs for sale. The prices were murder–something like $120 a CD, I think, but my math is not good–so we bought only two: a Beach Boys collection and the debut by Kings of Leon.
I want to say that this album has the best title conceived in my lifetime. The nine runner-up spots are all occupied by Guided by Voices, but No. 1 is Youth & Young Manhood by Kings of Leon–it’s so bold and plain that it could only have been begotten without guile by people who wouldn’t know why anyone would find it funny. It’s unaffected and sincere, as is the album, which is one of the chief reasons I think this, right now, is the best period in the last 15 years for people who like music made with guitars and drums and voices.
My hander-down of music that he’s found and that I pluck like low-hanging fruit, is my younger brother, who after many years of receiving the great bountiful benefit of my taste and expertise is now my primary lifeline to all that is good and new. His hand-me-ups are the reason I knew to buy Kings of Leon, and the reason I believe that they should be, as a group but functioning as one, elected governor of Tennessee. And that the Detroit Cobras should be put in charge of NASA and all current and future international space stations. And that the Libertines and the Elected should replace the royal families of Norway and Denmark. And that Desaparecidos should be given unlimited access to all the world’s high-speed trains and monorails and to as much gold bullion as they can carry.
3. So we played Youth & Young Manhood about 11 times in the course of that three-hour drive from London to coastal Wales and ten more on the way back to the London airport. This is one of the best and most American albums the U.S. has produced in years, and there’s nothing as good as listening to something so American while driving through the English countryside. The English countryside really looks the way the English countryside is supposed to look. It’s tidy, the roads are narrow, the greens are very green, and the roadsides aren’t polluted with billboards and gas stations. There are stone walls and pubs with names like the Thirsty Lion Killer and the Tipsy Barmaid. It’s all so neat and just-so that when you put on Kings of Leon, you feel like you’re defiling everything you pass, that the sloppiness of the sound and Caleb’s growly, scatty voice will somehow erode the landscape like a quick-moving glacier or an inland monsoon. You picture the band, the three Followill brothers–Caleb, Nathan, Jared–and their cousin Matthew, you see their long filthy hair and their mustaches, and their aura is so specific to a time and place in America that you want to drop them all on England’s pristine green countryside like a big, round, ugly American culture bomb.
The Followills and their videos look like they were made in the ’70s. The videos are grainy and clumsy, or are designed to look that way. They appear to have been filmed at a low-budget KOA campground in Tennessee. Everyone’s in T-shirts and bad jeans worn without smirks. The extras look like poor kids and fast kids, the kind who wear their shorts too high and tight with striped tube socks under their Walgreens-bought sandals. I have been to these types of campgrounds–not pretty, not clean, the Porta Potties stinking of lime and feces–and these campgrounds are Kings of Leon, and Kings of Leon are these campgrounds. Kings of Leon are two-door muscle cars and Piggly Wigglies and racist uncles and upholstery that stinks of smoke and signs on the inside of junior-high locker doors that say Cocaine Adds Life because that’s such a badass naughty pun.
Kings of Leon are motorboats on crowded lakes and waterskiing in cutoffs and hiding Milwaukee’s Best in the forest, in the snow, in January, because your parents caught on that you were keeping cases in the fridge in the garage. Kings of Leon are knowing a guy in juvie and having a cousin who’s been in jail twice. And that cousin, by the way, the one with the burns all over his right forearm–nothing interesting, just an accident with coffee–that cousin, Terry, would love Kings of Leon if he gave them a chance. You would, Terry. No, Terry, there aren’t any guitar solos or power ballads, but otherwise you have got to understand these guys, you have to own these guys, my man! No, Terry, they don’t really sound like the Strokes meet the Allman Brothers. Anyone who says they sound like the Allman Brothers is nuts. Would a member of Kings of Leon marry Cher? I just don’t think so, my incarcerated friend. Kings of Leon are the real deal, and I can’t describe them any better because it’s starting to seem like math, and this, as you know, causes me pain. Just listen to them a few dozen times–you have the time, I think–and you’ll know of what I speak.
I have no ending for this column. You know what was a pretty good movie? Tron. "
This man KNOWS
