What'd he say? It doesn't matter with Kings of Leon

Do rock lyrics matter? Not in the hands of a band as good as the Kings of Leon they don't.

As it was with "Wild Thing," so it is with the Kings' Caleb Followill. Because for the most part, I couldn't make out a word that the leader of the Tennessee family band sang on Thursday night at the sold-out Electric Factory.

Followill - who fronts a getting-better-all-the-time unit that features his brothers Nathan and Jared on drums and bass, respectively, and cousin Matthew on snazzy lead guitar - is a yowling, froggy-voiced singer.

His timbre shouts out from the backwoods of Tenneseee, where he and his brothers grew up, when they weren't traveling throughout the South with their holy-rolling, Pentecostal preacher father, Leon. It's not pretty, but it sure is distinctive.

And I don't mean to imply that the Kings come up short in the word department. Their favored subjects - dangerous women, sleek automobiles - place them right there in the Chuck Berry tradition.

On their excellent new album Because of the Times, they take off in a Coupe de Ville in the unexpected pregnancy song "Knocked Up" - a title to which they beat director Judd Apatow by two months. And in "Camaro," Caleb sings "She looks so good in her new Camaro / It's black as coal and boy it go-go-goes." Doesn't get much more elemental than that.

But I know that those are the words only because I looked at the lyric sheet. At the Factory, where bodies ebbed and flowed together in a packed mass at the foot of the stage, whatever it was that Caleb was saying was immaterial because the Followills were so locked in as a band.

The Kings emerged in 2003 with the abominably titled Youth and Young Manhood, when they were labeled the "Southern Strokes." That was apt because the Followills carry themselves with a swagger similar to those cocksure New Yorkers (and are similarly immobile on stage), and because their music melds long-hair twang with streetwise, punkish verve.

Since then, the Kings have grown ever more effective and accomplished. And on songs like the opening "Black Thumbnail" and "Molly's Chambers" the blood relations' bass, drums and guitars played off each other with intuitive effortlessness.

I didn't catch a whiff of anything funny-smelling until about an hour in, when the band was shouting its commitment "to be there!" in "On Call." But all night long, the Factory was thick with the aroma of refined '70s Southern rock given an urgent, up-to-the-minute boot-kick in the pants.