BEST SOCIAL MILEAGE RECORD BUY

Kings of Leon

We disrelish going into lousy-deal Kim’s Music and Video (St. Marks), but we had already traipsed half the East Village looking for a band we'd just heard of called My Morning Jacket.

We were ready to gamble on the group solely on a few reviews and that “feeling” we were getting. Scoff if you will, but going with that feeling before had drove us to such discoveries as Coldplay, The Verve, and David Grey.

We didn’t need to hear My Morning Jacket to play it fast and loose. Perhaps because we kept imagining they would sound like The Band meets The Flaming Lips -- and it was the search for this combination that kept us alive this past year. Naturally, Kim’s didn’t have it yet.

No way could we accept total buyer’s defeat. So we went to our back-up pick, the Kings Of Leon, because a music writer in a respectable British magazine called them the “Southern Strokes.” Of course, that's exactly the second album that Julian and the boys should have made.

Some bands sound fabulous after three vodka tonics in Lolita (Broome St.) but misfire badly when you play them alone in your bedroom. Such as Kings Of Leon.

Strangely, despite never playing them, we found ourselves raving about the Kings Of Leon to everyone from the cute bikerish bartendress at Welcome To The Johnson's (Rivington St.) to corporatey uptown friends looking for some help in the cool music department.

Did we say we were proud?

Many months later a friend finally burned the My Morning Jacket album for us. Pretty good shit. Kind of like, say, The Band meets The Flaming Lips.