Sex En Fuego.

Dear friends.

It has been long…too long….I know. However, Forth and I are done bouncing all over the midwest, we still have entirely too many leftover Christmas cookies, and we have returned to continue with (semi) regular blogs.

Today is brought to you by the letter K, for Kings of Leon.

This lovely Nashville band is currently my favorite of the hour–it all started about 4 years ago when I first started working at the coffee shop in the Cities. Two of my co-workers were obsessed with the band and played Aha Shake Heartbreak on the overhead at every opportunity. I liked the sound and how the music made me feel, so I ripped the CD and particularly enjoyed this track:

Though their latest record, Only by the Night, was released nearly 5 months ago, I only listened to the whole thing through this afternoon, and I’m more in love than I was previously. Caleb Followill’s voice is, as many high school girls say nowadays, SEX. Plain and simple. The things he does to the ends of words is like reaching into my chest, removing my still-beating heart, nestling it into the palm of his hand, and then watching it explode into thousands of bright glittering lights and butterfly twinkles and long walks on the beach and shit.

When I hear Kings of Leon on the radio (and I was surprised) I want the song to last and last until I reach the Pacific.

Speaking of the radio, I was unsurprised to hear “Sex on Fire” pulled as their first single off Only by the Night because……..it does not really sound like Kings of Leon of old. This is much like how My Chemical Romance didn’t get airplay till they dropped the metal act and started being “punk.” But nobody really cares about MCR now, so whatevs. There are obvious similarities in the sounds of Only by the Night and Aha Shake Heartbreak, but KOL dropped the quirky oddities of their old sound and thus….radio magic.

Even still, there is no denying that this song:

makes me all sorts of happy….even though there are chickens hanging from the ceiling in the video. We can get beyond that, and the fact that Back is trying to be some sort of music critic. Bottom line is when it comes to Kings of Leon, I like what I hear.

**Back.