Transatlantic revivalist duo The Kills (Alison “VV” Mosshart and Jamie “Hotel” Hince) are the bitter aftertaste of a time when rock ‘n’ roll was the rattling soundtrack to broken bottles/hearts, when jukebox keys held fast to the rotten residue of countless nicotine stained fingers and one electric guitar chord could murder both god and the devil in a single strum. Their new album Blood Pressures (in stores and online Tuesday) is the most eerily evocative thing you’re liable to hear all year: these eleven tunes are positively dripping with enough empty alley nostalgia and cold turkey paranoia to give each note the weight of a thousand years of hurt and longing.
“There’s a time for the second best,” Mosshart breathes halfway through the skittering lo-fi dirge of “Future Starts Slow”, “There’s a time when the feeling’s gone… but it’s hard to be hard, I guess, when you’re shaking like a dog.” There’s a whole lot of shaking going on here; you can hear each loose drumhead, every guitar string rattling against every rusty fret. There’s a circus like quality to first single “Satellite”, an eerie walk up some broken down boardwalk with Mosshart’s airy background vocals swirling like a cloud of cigarette smoke. Hince’s guitar solos are a patched-up mess of half-decided chords and bloody callous indecisiveness, building up and then tumbling apart like a tower of bricks.
Some of Midnight Boom’s pop sensibility is back, with “Heart Is A Beating Drum” flaunting a robotic Krautrock beat and Alison in full “shake your hips” ‘60s pop mode. The punky dance textures of “Nail In My Coffin” are a dirty syringe of adrenaline, with Hince’s guitar lines skipping and twitching like turntable scratching, undercutting the animalistic “oh-oh-ohhh” of the vocal hook. “Quit being a nail in my coffin, I don’t need another one… Lord knows I ain’t ready yet,” Alison coos, exercising her inner Missippi Delta demons over a hissing and pounding, almost industrial machine groove. The dream pop, psychedelic wash of “Wild Charms” and (especially) broken gramophone drama of “The Last Goodbye” are a welcome hangover cure, giving the album its emotional core with their corner of the room, upright piano arrangements pulling Mosshart’s voice out of the gutter and up towards the angels.
While there’s gritty sexuality and bluesy swagger to spare on the superb “DNA” and “Damned If She Do” (the latter’s fuzzy T. Rex style shuffle is a throwback treat), it’s the closing “Pots and Pans” that steals the show: a cavernous, booming drum loop clears a path for the death rattle of Jamie’s guitar, leading a traditionalist, call the devil down blues stomp. With overlapping six-string ferocity bleeding into the red, Mosshart unleashes a tersely moving coda (“These are the days we’ll never forget, when it dawns on you…”) that ends Blood Pressures on a bleak but poignant note that gives emotional weight to everything preceding it.
Dark, sexy, and filled to the brim with enough cheap hotel room intimacy to give you the shivers, the new Kills album is the real deal: a stark and stunning reminder that less is almost always more, that a noisy electric guitar can summon all sorts of spirits, and that VV and Hotel are secretly reinventing rock ‘n’ roll while dancing with its forgotten ghosts.
Sum-ology: Dark, bluesy, sexy, and emotionally devastating—everything we’ve come to expect from The Kills.
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