Tension Low? Listen to some new Kills...

The Kills, Blood Pressures

2011

In this neck of the woods, I often hear the complaint "my tension is low". Moldovans refer to their blood pressure here. If they feel lackluster, they know it's because the ol' singe ain't thrummin so fine. It's like a country full of educated diabetics. It's awesome. We Murkans just say things like "i feel glum" or "I don't know what's wrong with me". Eat something salty and sweet and get on with it.

Also helpful: kick ass music.

The Kills have been (sorry) killing with their discography. Their first two albums sounding like they were written and recorded in a trash can behind the bar where The White Stripes were becoming famous. Which is to say, awesome and more aggressive about it.

Their third, Midnight Boom, departs a bit with synthy touches all over the place. Just as fundamental in makeup and design, just electronic. The departure is neither good nor bad for the band since it's just a different form of sounding really really good.

This new effort, 3 years later, is itself a synthesis. Blood Pressures has no electronic SOUNDING stuff, but the production itself, the electronic mixing and so forth, is so far and away more expensive sounding the listener knows they have landed among the rock angels at last.

Another way to say this is they sound like a British version of The White Stripes. Which, it turns out, they half are. The guy (brit) even married Kate Moss recently. The chick, meanwhile was drafted into one of Jack White's side projects (The Dead Weather). Blood Pressure was recorded in Michigan and mixed in London. We can see where this extra cash flow and recognition is coming from.

And where it's going. Blood Pressures is garage rock at its best. Where bands like the White Stripes and The Black Keys do garage rock in thick bluesy refrains and masculine bludgeoning, The Kills are sharp, and wickedly feminine racket-rousers.

For one thing, their lead singer is female. Alison Mosshart has an imperfect voice that drips with sardonic sex. Jamie Hince, backs up with some seriously delicate harmonies. The guitar work is precise, fuzzing out now and then with one or another of the climaxes per song. There are acoustics; there's finger slide work, there is variation in warp. There's reverb with finger picking layering over it. The noise makes a sick back drop for what they are actually presenting:

A sucker punched Clash/Nirvana confrontation. Audibly, it's gritty and loud. Emotionally it's brutal. Either it will jack up a second wind for you on a gray day, or it'll drain every last drop of frustration out of your cochleas.

Opening with Future Starts Slow, Mosshart and Hince declare their undying love for someone. who may "swing, you may sail / you can fuck like a broken sail/ but I'll never give you up". They know this person will also be the only one to "know what's left of my right mind". They get on with life regardless of its pitfalls.

The Last Goodbye, their only ballad, looks at better off days and sighs "I can't rely/on a dime a day/that dont go anywhere." Though the conviction is a bit weaker, the intent is the same. Life may give you lemons, and you don't even have to make the damn lemonade, just take the vitamin c.

Soon enough they revel in the sentiment with some very Shirley Mansonish thoughts in She Damned if She Do: "She come alive when she's dying/ ...some of them left in one piece/and some she damn near broke". They are not afraid of singing about life in the material crap shoot, or the romantic version.

Inspirational stuff for those cynics among us. Fun, head rocking stuff for those concert rats among us. It's even singable -- if you aren't afraid of projecting.

My tension's higher already.