Kings of Leon- "Because of the Times", Top 25 hit!

[roentgenizdat]

04/21: NEW 25 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 41,919 10458.9% 397 42,329

[oscillations.]

#1 in the UK again.

[roentgenizdat]

Kings of Leon Heap Praise On Their British Fans

Kings of Leon have heaped praise upon their trusty British fans and thanked them for sending them to number one for a second week.

Bassist Jared Followill says that the Tennessee outfit have been celebrating non stop since they first hit the top spot eight days ago.

He beamed: "We're just making music for ourselves and luckily people are with us. Especially you guys. You guys (the British public) have always been with us and the fact that we've made a record that's a little different and a little riskier, and it got to number one here, that's the best thing.

"We feel like it's going to be bigger everywhere else than the others have, so as long as you guys stick with us and keep us afloat, we'll be happy."

Reflecting on the non-stop partying the band have been doing, Jared continued to 6music: "We've been celebrating a little too much. It's kind of like, alright guys you can quit celebrating now."

Frontman Caleb added: "It's not like a birthday either, you stay number one for a week so we get to party all week."

Despite reaching number one in the UK, Kings of Leon only made number 25 in their native America.

[joker]

Very cool..... the #1 album in the UK for two weeks running, and a career-best top 25 showing in the US.

[roentgenizdat]

04/28: 25 45 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 15,103 -64.0% 41,919 57,432

[joker]

Kings Of Leon @ Apollo (Live Review)
Helen Tither
21/ 4/2007



Heralded by a heavenly chorus of operatic overtures, the Kings of Leon appear on stage like rock missionaries sent from above.

Preacher blood does run in the veins of these Deep South-raised rebel rousers, after all. But this crowd needs no converting.

Within minutes an evangelical fervour sweeps the room as fans are left powerless against the urge to dance and thrash around to the frenzied sounds emanating from the stage.

It's like you'd imagine the Second Coming, sponsored by NME. Only dirtier.

Because, in truth, it's hard to believe these preachers' kids - frontman Caleb Followill, his brothers Jared and Nathan, and cousin Matthew - ever led their now famously chronicled sheltered religious childhood.

Not when ladies man Caleb thrusts his hips against his guitar, sending young impressionable females in the room all a-flutter. Surely there must be at least one of the 10 commandments against that.

Impressionable

Ah, how different they seemed four years ago, when they first graced a Manchester stage - all fringes, and crazy facial hair. Such quiet impressionable boys, they seemed, plucked from their hermit-like existence to pedal their musical wares.

Now, beardless - and much more fearless - they've certainly grown up some since debut album, Youth and Young Manhood.

Bolder in style, scrapping that hairy caveman look for a tanned California-inspired edge, Caleb struts and preens his way around the microphone like the love-child of Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger. With the fashion sense of Russell Brand (think ultra-skinny jeans), meets The OC.

It's a good look. But, more importantly, a good sound. Just as albums two and three have proved ever more masterful, so too their live set has matured into a ferocious blast of musical perfection.

It's a short gig at just over an hour. Short, but oh-so perfectly formed. Every song an other-worldly surge of fast and dirty guitars, devilishly good drumming, topped off with that growling drawl of a vocal.

It seems almost churlish to pick out favourites - but let's give a special mention to Milk, Slow Night, So Long, and recent hit On Call. Pure brilliance.

If this is the gospel according to the Kings of Leon, hallelujah.

[joker]

The album drops from #1 in the UK, to #3 this week.

[roentgenizdat]

05/05: 45 64 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 10,308 15,103 67,740

[joker]

From a new nights ago, KOL's performance on The Tonight Show w/Jay Leno.

[roentgenizdat]

05/12: 64 90 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 7,760 -25 10,308 75,500

[joker]

Kings of England
With a No. 1 album in the UK, Kings of Leon are all but exiled from Main Street USA.

By Rob Trucks
Published: May 3, 2007

The several, several days and nights of waiting to hear from someone — anyone —with a Kings of Leon pedigree finally conclude with a nearly last-minute cell-phone hookup with Matthew Followill (cousin to Caleb, Jared and Nathan), guitarist and one-quarter of Kings of Leon.

To celebrate, I ride the subway home listening to the Stones' classic Exile on Main Street. Right now, post-long-awaited interview, on a New York City subway where thronged commuters have certainly learned to keep their conversations, if not their hands, to themselves, and where iPods are as de rigueur as pants, I'm rocking out to "Rocks Off" while, a quarter of a world away, Kings of Leon proceeds with its final UK set.

Maybe Exile is a cleanser for my aural palate. Perhaps I've overdosed from almost a week of daily cram sessions with the third and latest Kings album, Because of the Times. Or maybe I've just got Jagger on the brain.

Or blame the official Kings of Leon press kit, which is infested with the band's brushes with greatness: photo shoots with Chrissie Hynde, an onstage jam with Eddie Vedder, opening stints for U2 and Bob Dylan. Then there's Mick Jagger, who leaves his daughter behind after a casual backstage rock-and-roll royalty visitation.

Both the famous and the British — and the Stones frontman is undeniably both — love them some Kings of Leon.

A full 80 percent of sales of the band's first two albums, Youth and Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak, occurred within British borders, and Because of the Times launched to No. 1 on the UK charts. There's already talk of a show at Wembley, England's live-music mother lode, when the boys return this summer.

"I hope America wises up and, you know, starts to like us or whatever," Matthew says from somewhere inside the cavernous Carling Academy in Glasgow, Scotland. "But, I mean, it's fine in America. It's like, we play to, like, 1,500 kids, you know, and that's pretty good. It'll feel weird to come back and play for such a little crowd, and a crowd that might not care as much as a big crowd here, but as far as leaving here, I'm ready to get back to America, man."

During its first week back in the States, the band's profile will be high, with performances on The Tonight Show and the Coachella festival. But prior to this tour, Kings of Leon was likely best-known for a different kind of press-kit posturing.

As the story goes, the three Followill brothers spent their youth (and young manhood) traveling America's highways and byways in their father's charge as Leon Followill, a former itinerant and now defrocked Pentecostal preacher, spread the word of God. The fruits of rock and roll were strictly forbidden. (Cousin Matthew's upbringing was just a little more normal.)

By now, however, Matthew and his cousins are sick to death of the reference.

"We got tired of that on the last record," he says. "We're like, Jesus. Like, please."

And yet, the story gave the band a hook that helped attract a ready-made audience of Brits. Like the Stones and their Delta blues fixation, the British love all things Southern —what's myopically seen as "the real thing."

Despite one track, "Camaro," named for the patron steed of the below-the-Mason-Dixon-line working class, Kings of Leon makes a move on Because of the Times to rub away the stamp of post-Pentecostal Southern-rock band. Whereas Exile was the result of a big band pulling back the reins into a claustrophobic chateau of sound, Because is expansive, spacious and ambitious, a long-limbed stretch for a band that has come late to the rock-and-roll game.

True, singer Caleb Followill's frenzied yelps don't match the beneficent, symbolic musings of, say, Bono. But the Kings' instrumentation borrows heavily from the postpunk, arena-rock efforts of acts such as U2. Listen to the separated bass of "Charmer" (see: the Pixies) and the Edge-influenced guitar triplets of "Ragoo."

"It's bigger," Matthew says. "We toured with a lot of bigger bands, and we played big stadiums and stuff like that, and we were writing songs, and we just really liked the way they sounded in those rooms."

If the music doesn't provide the be-all and end-all? If a writer feels compelled to mention Matthew's cousins' youthful travels with their fire-and-brimstone father through a South that's all but forgotten? Well, the guitarist is smart enough or polite enough or Southern enough (they're not mutually exclusive, you know) to bestow his secular blessing.

"If you have to," he says, "it's fine."

[joker]

Rock 'n' royal: Kings of Leon bring it

By Shawn Telford
Special to the Seattle P-I

The South will rise again? Darlin', the South has done it already. In fact, they're doin' it now. All over America. Of course we're talking about Southern rock -- that old-fashioned sweaty version of gritty, guitar-based rock 'n' roll that goes so well with cold beer, bird dogs, Kentucky bluegrass, fast women and hot cars.

Before Elvis preached that Southern gospel, there was Little Richard and Bo Diddley; then came the Allman Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Lynyrd Skynyrd; more recently, Drive-By Truckers, the Black Crowes, My Morning Jacket and Shooter Jennings (the son of late country star Waylon Jennings) have been bringin' it. But on Wednesday night, three young, hirsute brothers and a cousin from Tennessee who call themselves Kings of Leon really brought it to the Moore Theatre, and the packed house couldn't have been more uproarious.

"You guys are way better than the crowd at Coachella," the band announced at one point. Take that, California!

Kings of Leon tend toward straightforward songs that center on Caleb Followill's scratchy, ever-straining voice and Matthew (he's the cousin) Followill's slick, aerobic guitar (his solos shredded; his solos ripped; his solos wailed. The one thing his solos never did was be quiet. Even in the ballads, when his fingering slowed, the notes widened but stayed athletic.).

Meanwhile, the rhythm section was forever crisp, stopping and starting most songs on a dime or ending with a pronounced T-K-O! The tunes rarely stretched beyond three to four minutes with little rest between, giving the show a brisk feel while also filling the songs with dynamic loud and soft interplay. Here, Kings of Leon are at their best, for the foursome really knows how to play with expectations -- some say "tease." Although, not surprisingly, they always gave big, explosive returns to taut moments of mounting tension.

The songs were pulled evenly from the band's three albums, and as its live performance indicates, there's no studio magic plastering over spotty musicianship; the Kings are the real deal and, man, can they play. At times, they drifted toward blues rock, like the opening "Black Thumbnail" and later during "Spiral Staircase"; on one occasion, they flirted with a jumping rockabilly rhythm, "Four Kicks." No matter what they dabbled in, the Kings brought it into the fold.

In what seemed like a short time, the set closed with "Trani," from their full-length debut, "Youth and Young Manhood." The song begins as a high school slow dance but soon unravels into a heavy-petting, hard-rock riot with shivering fits and spurts that would have ended the show were it not for a short encore.

"Slow Night, So Long" concluded the set, but it won't be long before we hear more from these Kings of Leon.

[roentgenizdat]

05/19: 90 101 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 7,536 -3 7,760 83,036

[joker]

Kings of Leon electrify HOB

02:01 PM CDT on Monday, May 14, 2007
By THOR CHRISTENSEN / Pop Music Critic

Kings of Leon's first big Dallas show came in 2003 when they warmed up for fellow garage-rockers (and alleged next-big-things) the Strokes. But while the Strokes never added up to sum of their obvious influences, the Kings just keep going and growing.

Performing Sunday at a sold-out House of Blues, Tennessee brothers Caleb, Jared and Nathan Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill mixed sin and salvation in their lyrics while balancing jangle and thunder in their music. It was heady stuff: Tom Petty by way of Flannery O'Connor, although some new tunes took on the anthem-like quality of U2.

The Kings toured with Bono and company in 2005 and obviously took notes. "On Call" recalled the martial beat of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" while "Knocked Up" came from the Edge school of chiming guitar.

While lead guitarist Matthew Followill has yet to blossom into a great soloist, he was never lacking for taut riffs: from the "Beat It"-style figure in "Charmer" to a series of hard-rock licks that would make Jack White green with envy. Most garage bands settle for loud, grimy guitars. Matthew knows grime means nothing without melody.

But if Matthew was the heart of the Kings' sound, cousin Caleb was the guts, mumbling and howling and screeching like a red-tailed hawk. He sang about whorehouses ("Arizona"), gun-toting jezebels ("Molly Chambers") and sexual dysfunction ("Soft") in a voice that teetered between ecstasy and anguish.

As performers, they were a static bunch – playing with gusto, but rarely moving from their appointed spots on the stage. For musicians who cut their teeth playing in a family band on the Pentecostal church circuit, you'd think they could muster up a little more brimstone.

But the crowd was plenty riled up on its own and it almost started moshing during the amphetamine rush of "Four Kicks." Caleb seemed duly impressed: "We played a House of Blues in New Orleans the other night, and you guys make that town look like (expletive), man."

Or maybe he just likes to butter up his fans. A few weeks ago, he told the crowd in Seattle it was "way better than the audience at Coachella."

Either way, the Kings whipped Sunday night's crowd into a lather – including a gang of the Followills' Oklahoma relatives who were whooping it up in the balcony. The guy with the biggest grin on his face was Leon Followill, the brothers' father and the band's eponym.

[roentgenizdat]

05/26: 101 141 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 6,062 -20 7,536 89,098

[joker]

"McFearless" is set to be the 2nd single.

[joker]

Kings of England[/url]

By Rob Trucks and Andy Vihstadt
Published: May 23, 2007

The several, several days and nights of waiting to hear from someone — anyone — with a Kings of Leon pedigree finally conclude with a nearly last-minute cell-phone hookup with Matthew Followill, cousin to Caleb, Jared and Nathan, guitarist and one-quarter of Kings of Leon.

To celebrate, I ride the subway home listening to the Stones' classic Exile on Main Street. Right now, post-long-awaited interview, on a New York City subway where thronged commuters have certainly learned to keep their conversations, if not their hands, to themselves, and where iPods are as de rigueur as pants, I'm rocking out to "Rocks Off" while, a quarter of a world away, Kings of Leon proceeds with its final U.K. set.

Maybe Exile is a cleanser for my aural palate. Perhaps I've overdosed from almost a week of daily cram sessions with the third and latest Kings album, Because of the Times. Or maybe I've just got Jagger on the brain.

Or blame the official Kings of Leon press kit, which is infused with the band's brushes with greatness: photo shoots with Chrissie Hynde, an onstage jam with Eddie Vedder, opening stints for U2 and Bob Dylan. Then there's Mick Jagger, who leaves his daughter behind after a casual backstage rock-&-roll-royalty visitation.

Both the famous and the British — and the Stones frontman is undeniably both — love them some Kings of Leon.

A full 80 percent of sales of the band's first two albums, Youth & Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak, occurred within British borders, and Because of the Times launched to No. 1 on the UK charts. (Sure, the Brits are also partial to Kasabian, but when's the last time you did something better than anyone else in an entire country?) There's already talk of a show at Wembley, England's live-music mother lode, when the boys return this summer.

"I hope America wises up and, you know, starts to like us or whatever," Matthew Followill says from somewhere inside the cavernous Carling Academy in Glasgow, Scotland. "But I mean, it's fine in America. It's like, we play to, like, 1,500 kids, you know, and that's pretty good. It'll feel weird to come back and play for such a little crowd, and a crowd that might not care as much as a big crowd here, but as far as leaving here, I'm ready to get back to America, man."

The band's profile isn't completely under the radar here; in April Kings of Leon performed on The Tonight Show and at Coachella. But prior to this tour, the group was likely best known for a different kind of press-kit posturing.

As the story goes, the three Followill brothers spent their youth (and young manhood) traveling America's highways and byways in their father's charge as Leon Followill, a former itinerant and now-defrocked Pentecostal preacher, spread the word of God. The fruits of rock & roll were strictly forbidden. (Cousin Matthew's upbringing was just a little more normal. "I didn't travel around too much, but my family did move around a lot," he says.)

By now, however, Matthew and his cousins are sick to death of the reference.

"We got tired of that on the last record," he says. "We're like, 'Jesus.' Like, Please."

And yet, the story gave the band a hook that helped attract a ready-made audience of Brits. Like the Stones and their Delta-blues fixation, the British love all things Southern. What's myopically seen as "the real thing."

Despite one track, "Camaro," named for the patron steed of the below-the-Mason-Dixon-line working class, Kings of Leon makes a move on Because of the Times to rub away the stamp of post-Pentecostal Southern-rock band. Whereas Exile was the result of a big band pulling back the reins into a claustrophobic château of sound, Because is expansive, spacious and ambitious, a long-limbed stretch for a band that has come late to the rock game.

True, singer Caleb Followill's frenzied yelps don't match the beneficent, symbolic musings of, say, Bono. But the Kings' instrumentation borrows heavily from the post-punk, arena-rock efforts of acts such as U2. Listen to the separated bass of "Charmer" (see: the Pixies) and the Edge-influenced guitar triplets of "Ragoo."

"It's bigger," Matthew says. "We toured with a lot of bigger bands, and we played big stadiums and stuff like that, and we were writing songs, and we just really liked the way they sounded in those rooms. We've got more atmospheric songs on this record, but a lot of it is because we started using guitar pedals and vocal effects and reverb on the drums and stuff to make it sound like it was big, you know."

And if the music doesn't provide the be-all and end-all? If a writer feels compelled to mention Matthew's cousins' youthful travels with their fire-and-brimstone father through a South that's all but forgotten? Well, the guitarist is either smart enough or polite enough or Southern enough (they're not mutually exclusive, you know) to bestow his secular blessing.

"If you have to," he says, "it's fine."

[roentgenizdat]

06/02: 141 143 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 5,313 -12 6,062 94,411

[roentgenizdat]

06/09: 143 147 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 4,907 5,313 99,318

[joker]

They're on Conan's show tonight.

[joker]

New dates:

8/2-8/3 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue
9/2 Seattle, WA - Venue TBA
9/4 San Francisco, CA - Warfield Theatre
9/7 Los Angeles, CA - Greek Theatre
9/14 Morrison, CO - Red Rocks Amphitheatre (Monolith Festival)
9/19 New York, NY - Radio City Music Hall
10/6 Mountain View, CA - Shoreline Amphitheatre (Download Festival)

[roentgenizdat]

06/16: 147 174 KINGS OF LEON BECAUSE OF THE TIMES 4,119 -16 4,907 103,437

[roentgenizdat]

Dropped off the BB200.

[oscillations.]

Good.

They need to stop thinking they can get BRMC to open (instead of COHEADLINE) for them. What betches.

[roentgenizdat]

Billboard Bits: Kings Of Leon/BRMC

July 12, 2007, 4:30 PM ET
Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.

Kings Of Leon will tour North America this fall with RCA labelmates Black Rebel Motorcycle Club as the opening act. The outing begins Sept. 4 in San Francisco and will run through an Oct. 18 show in Nashville. Several festival shows are sprinkled into the itinerary, including Sept. 2 at Seattle's Bumbershoot festival and Oct. 28 at the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans.

Kings Of Leon will be out in support of their third RCA album, "Because of the Times," which has sold 120,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Here are King Of Leon's tour dates:

Aug. 2-3: Minneapolis (First Avenue)
Aug. 5: Chicago (Lollapalooza)
Sept. 2: Seattle (Bumbershoot Festival)
Sept. 4: San Francisco (Warfield Theatre)
Sept. 7: Los Angeles (Greek Theatre)
Sept. 8: San Diego (SDSU Open Air Theatre)
Sept. 10: Tempe, Ariz. (Marquee Theatre)
Sept. 11: Las Vegas (the Joint)
Sept. 14: Morrison, Colo. (Red Rocks)
Sept. 15: Council Bluffs, Iowa (Harrah's Casino)
Sept. 19: New York (Radio City Music Hall)
Sept. 21: Upper Darby, Pa. (Tower Theatre)
Sept. 23: Washington, D.C. (9:30 Club)
Sept. 28: Boston (Orpheum Theatre)
Sept. 29: Providence, R.I. (Lupo's)
Oct. 4: Detroit (Fillmore)
Oct. 9: Atanta (Fox Theatre)
Oct. 10: Birmingham, Ala. (Alabama Theatre)
Oct. 18: Nashville (Ryman Auditorium)
Oct. 28: New Orleans (Voodoo Music Experience)