a handful of kicks and shivers short of pulverizing excellence. One of the best things about this album is its promise: knowing how much more fun you'll have when the Kings -- already sporting the best hair in twenty-first-century garage rock (like a frontier-militia version of the Seeds) -- nail that Exile on Main Street-style balance between rigor and ruthlessness, discipline and blowout.

Born into a fundamentalist Christian family, the Followills have come to the devil's music via the Lord's work; the brothers grew up on the road with their father, Leon, a traveling evangelist. In concert, the Kings tear the air with all of the contradictory tension that implies: pump-action guitars and hellbent gallop honed with Amish-Ramones austerity; songs of going wrong and paying dearly, sung by Caleb in a tent-show Bon Scott howl, like he's choking on brimstone.

The records almost get you there. Heartbreak is an instance when that hoary music-biz cliche -- "They're better onstage" -- rings true; ironically so, since the Kings and producer Ethan Johns recorded Aha Shake Heartbreak live in the studio, with no overdubs. They didn't seem to spend anything on reverb either. The saloon-brawl guitars and wolf-eye glow of Manhood have been exchanged here for a dark, dry mood that, on first listen, mutes the Kings' transgressive fury and pop-hook luster. Never mind the hill-country Strokes comparisons of two years ago. The odd beat math and angular stab of the guitars in "King of the Rodeo" sound like barn-dance Wire.But once you adjust to the jutting-riff edges in the first song, "Slow Nights, So Long," and the way Caleb's vocal and Matthew's chiming guitar pull against the beat, the classic rock inside the Kings busts out. The dirty, grunting strum at the front is a nifty tip o' the amp to the Who's "Goin' Mobile," and Nathan gets to liberate his inner Keith Moon, usually held in puritan check, in the breaks. In "The Bucket," the pneumatic guitars and Nathan's tom-tom rolls brake into a chorus of harmonized sighs over a stuttering heartbeat that sends you back to the Ronettes' "Be My Baby."

The Kings have a unique momentum -- Jared's bass often plays the anchoring riff, sandwiched by the snort and snarl of the guitars -- and the band frequently splits its songs into separate verse, chorus and bridge rhythms and tempos, a variant on Nirvana's soft-loud dynamic. It'