I am a potty mouth. I swear often and a good portion of it (roughly 30%?) is unneccesary. I like to think I am good at it and usually at censoring myself. Often times I'll find myself acting less than my age in the middle of a rant and then I'll just trail off my sentence and look at my feet. "this is a bunch of faahh.........". But I came to realize that I have not been counting some of my cyber-swears in with my grand total. I also find it interesting that this current generation with our e-mail/text/IM dependency have created very popular acronyms that include swears. This indicates that as a generation, we swear so much that we have built it into our primary development of the newest cyber language. WTF and OMFG are very popular phrases used since the inception of quick-type conversations. You would think we would come up with acronyms describing food, water, love, happyness. But alas, our first utterances are ones of surprised anger and cursing out our maker. The sad thing is, I am almost positive the cavemen created language using the exact same principle.
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I am going to try to get better at censoring myself. Especially since I noticed I use the awful word "effin" outloud and wayyyyyy too much. I hate that I would use such an ugly word so often, but its somehow become engrained like the delicious cinnamon flavor in Cinnamon Life cereal. YuMmmmm..........
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NUMBER 4: Kings of Leon "Because of the Times" - I bought this album on December 20th, 2007. I listened to it once, and enjoyed it a good deal, and had it penciled in the chart at number 16. As I did the reviews, this album kept getting constant rotation. It grew on me more and MOre, and MORE!
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Kings of Leon is a band of 3 brothers and cousin with the last name Followil out of Nashville, TN. The band name comes from their father and grandfather who are both name Leon. They come from an almost mormon-esque upbringing, homeschooled while following their father on his travels as a preacher in the United Pentacostal Church. Denied the education in pop music history, the brothers Followil learned to play country music first and gradually morphed into rock and roll upon signing with mega label RCA.
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"Because of the Times" was reviewed as the bands best to date (they have 2 previous albums) by the big money reviewers NME.com and Entertainment Weekly, and they were also praised by superstars Radiohead as one of their favorite modern bands.
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My go-to source
Pitchfork.com gave the album a bad review. Accused them of crooning too much to the girls, ego-tripping on a fake rock star lifestyle, shallow lyrics, and copying U2's sound from the early 90's. All of which is true, pitchfork is surprisingly adept at picking apart an album and identifying trends, weaknesses, and intentions. Unfourtunatly, they are their own worst enemy in which they spend so much time analyzing the music that they often don't listen to it as well as they should. They over-rate albums that manage to do all the little things right and under-rate albums for failing to be 100% original. You get lots of audiophile high reviews for crazy sounds, and usually medium ratings for really good albums that fail to do something completely unique. So you pick and choose with pitchfork.
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This album is great start to finish. I like every single song and every single word that is said and the way it is said. It sounds GREAT in your car, and great for a workout. Thumping bass guitar makes it head-bopabble and the vocals are rock star loud, but never screaming. Except on Charmer where it somehow fits perfectly and is one of my favorites along with Ragoo, My party, and Arizona. Plus, even better, they can play live as good as in the studio. Please give this album more than one listen, it gets better and better each time.
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That said, maybe I like this album so much due to my U2 foundation. I love everything pitchfork criticizes it for. The echoey slashing guitars, the womanizing lyrics, and cheesy country-sultry vocals and the percussion work from Nathan Followil is top top top notch. Listen for it. I don't listen to enough rock because outside of Foo Fighters and The White Stripes, not too many bands play great straight rock anymore. This is a throwback album to the days when cars were loud and fast, men weren't afraid to act like their dads, jeans were dirty from actual dirt, and your girl was your girl for better or worse, not till better came along.....
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