Dark Beats

I didn't pay that much attention to the last album by The Kills, "No Wow." It's not that I tried to avoid it, but at that certain time of 2005 I was listening to a lot of more upbeat indie pop stuff and "No Wow" just completely didn't gel with all that. It was dark, gritty and cool. The Kills also remind me of The Raveonettes in that they're a male/female duo making very uinhappy music in a very raw-sounding way. Keep in mind that I was less than inspired with The Raveonettes before this year, so The Kills weren't doing me any favors by sounding somewhat similar.

This year The Raveonettes came through with a powerhouse of an album in "Lust Lust Lust" that gave me all kinds of respect for them, and now The Kills have their third record "Midnight Boom" set for release on Tuesday and suddenly I'm thrilled about that. This year I haven't heard much blissed out indie pop and instead have focused much more on the darker, amped up side of things, and maybe this Kills album is arriving at just the right time.

To call The Raveonettes and The Kills nearly the same band is somewhat cheap and tacky on my part, because there's plenty of things that separate the two. For one, The Kills tend to have a more stripped down sound that uses less distortion on most of their tracks and generally makes everything sound a little cleaner. But what The Kills lack in distortion they make up for in remarkable vocal performances and occasional danceability. Yes, The Kills use a drum machine and I mainly look at that as a benefit when everything is said and done. The machine dictates the tempo on a few songs and really gets your toes tapping. Though the guitars aren't nearly cranked up to 11 most of the time, volume of many of the songs combined with the high beat speed can create songs like I haven't heard since Death From Above 1979 was together. It's great to have something like that bursting through speakers every now and then.

As I also said, the vocal performances are really impressive here. In particular Alison "VV" Mosshart does an exceptional job, taking a few songs to new levels that are eerily reminiscent of early PJ Harvey material. The wails and smack-in-the-face emotion behind many of the tracks literally made my jaw drop from time to time.

The first thing I did after listening to "Midnight Boom" was go back into my CD archives and pull out the previous Kills album, "No Wow." The conclusion I drew was that it was definitely better than I remembered but doesn't nearly match what's all over "Midnight Boom." Without a doubt this is the best Kills album, and I'll even venture to say it's better than the new Raveonettes album which I wholeheartedly recommended a couple weeks back. This is slightly less drenched in distortion but no less dark (hence the "midnight" in the title), yet much more danceable and cool. Lots of people will be turned off by this music, as I used to be, but for those of us that actually "get it," this will be one of the most remarkable albums of 2008 (thus far).

The Kills- Cheap and Cheerful

Stream the whole album at the band's Myspace page

Preorder "Midnight Boom" from Amazon

Labels: the kills