It's a good thing Kings of Leon did not make it to Minneapolis until November to promote their latest album. Had it been August instead, their sold-out show Saturday night at the Orpheum Theatre might have been sweltering enough to melt the ultra-tight jeans right off the band members' bodies.

Making the modest-sized but symbolic leap from First Avenue nightclub to the largest of downtown Minneapolis' ornate theaters, the quartet of three Tennessee-bred brothers and one cousin traded in some of the young-man angst and blazing fieriness of previous shows for a more libidinous, slow-burning 90-minute set.

With all the throbbing bass lines, grinding guitar parts and come-hither lyrics, it was no wonder that the crowd was half made up of young women, half of whom came armed with camera-equipped phones that never seemed to get put away.

Kings of Leon's once-subtle sexual undertones boil over on their latest CD, "Only by the Night," their fourth disc in a steady five-year ascent. They opened the show with the album's two kickoff tracks, "Closer" and "Crawl," and went on to play nearly the entire record.

"Hot as a fever rattling bones/ I could just taste it," the band's Leonardo DiCaprio-as-Southern-boy frontman Caleb Followill sang a few songs later in the blatantly titled "Sex on Fire," the single off the new album.

For the first half of the show, the Kings managed to still sound muscular even while remaining focused on that one particular muscle. AC/DC and early ZZ Top fans would have dug the hard-rock boogie of songs such as "Molly's Chamber," "Taper Jean Girl" and "King of the Rodeo."

The set list turned moodier and mellower in the second half, with mixed results. Several new songs showed the anthemic imprint of U2, which hired KoL to open its 2005 tour. The influence was a plus in the rousing "Use Somebody," which sounded custom-made to larger crowds. "Cold Desert," though, sounded way too chilled, and "Manhattan" also lagged during the all-around lackluster encore -- a fizzling finish, but the crowd certainly didn't leave feeling burned.

Fans who got there early enough to catch the first of two opening bands, the Whigs, definitely got their money's worth. The Georgia trio came off like the Southern answer to Nirvana as it rushed through its set, peaking with the back-to-back barn-burners "Already Young" and "Right Hand on My Heart."

See Kings of Leon's set list at startribune.com/poplife. chrisr@startribune.com • 612-673-4658