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3. Kings of Leon – Youth and Young Manhood – 2003

I just can’t intellectualize this pick.  It’s no Kid A or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  It’s not experimental at all.  I am sure it’s an influential rock record, but it certainly falls behind albums like The Strokes – This Is It and The White Stripes – Elephant (and probably White Blood Cells) on most professional critics lists of influential rock records of the decade.

I absolutely love filthy, dirty, southern white trash rock music (give me some Lynyrd Skynyrd or ZZ Top or the Stones’ Exile On Main Street) and this is it, the best of trailer-trash rock that I’ve heard in a long, long time. 

Do you want to see 4 dirtbags play southern rock?

Check out my boys in this live video of my favorite track on the album, Joe’s Head:

Don’t you just love the mustaches and the haircuts?

Here’s another, more spruced-up version of the band, still circa 2003, singing another tune from Youth… called Molly’s Chambers:

Gorgeous.  All this before Sex on Fire.

Notable(s):

KOL hails from Nashville, TN and is the “Followill” family band, consisting of brothers Caleb (Vocals/Guitar), Nathan (Drums) and Jared (Bass) and cousin Matthew Followill (Lead Guitar).

In 2003 when Youth and Young Manhood was released, Jared Followill (Bass) was just 16 years old, Jared, the drummer and the oldest member, was 23.

The band has evolved its sound considerably since Youth and Young Manhood and its follow-up, another white trash tour-de-force, Aha Shake Heartbreak (God, I love that name).  In 2006 KOL released Because the Times and in 2008 they released Only By the Night, two excellent albums produced with a cleaner more arena rock sound, and showcasing more melodic vocals from lead singer Caleb.

Here’s the video of KOL’s monster 2009 hit “Sex on Fire“.  I ask, where did these pretty boys come from?

My wife and I love KOL so much we used their song Use Somebody from Only By the Night as part of the wedding party introductions when we got married on Sept. 12, 2009.  We also stopped off to see KOL play at Nassau Coliseum (Uniondale, Long Island) on Sept. 14, 2009 on our way to our honeymoon in Montauk.

Use Somebody won this year’s Grammy Award for Record of the Year.

Next week, at #4, it gets a little more serious as I begin to bring out the singer-songwriters and my rock and roll hero…