I was up early this morning to
watch my beloved Miami Dolphins get pummeled by the Jets. We are a bad football
team right now, and even worse, I’m not sure much can be done to fix it. It is
going to be a long and painful season.
Fortunately, there is always
music. Lately I’ve been grooving on a lot of early Motorhead, Warren Zevon’s “Excitable
Boy” and new albums from Kurt Vile and the Dead Weather.
The Dead Weather have a connection
to this next review, since the two bands share the same lead singer.
Disc 788 is….Blood Pressures
Artist: The Kills
Year of Release: 2011
What’s up with the Cover? All dressed up with somewhere to
go. If you look out the window that somewhere appears to involve a beach.
How I Came To Know It: I worked my way backward to the
Kills. Our friends Joel and Sherylyn put me on to the Dead Weather (by way of
Jack White), and as alluded to in the teaser, Alison Mosshart is the lead
singer of both that band and the Kills. “Blood Pressures” was the first Kills
album I bought, and happened to be their most recent.
How It Stacks Up: I have four Kills albums which is
all of them. Hey, Kills, time for a new album (word has it they are working on
one). For now, though, of the four that exist, I’ll put “Blood Pressures” a
close second. Only “Keep On Your Mean Side” (reviewed way back at Disc 324) is better. Back then I said “Blood Pressures” was tied for first, but I
recant.
Ratings: 4 stars
The Kills were a revelation
when I discovered them. Heavy and groovy in equal measure, their fourth album “Blood
Pressures” is a master class in how to make awesome hard rock for the twenty
first century.
The band is fundamentally
just two people – lead singer/guitarist Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince, who
plays drums and everything else. Apparently there is no bass player, which is surprising
given how thick this sound is. You can thank (or curse) the White Stripes for
showing how you can make thick, crunchy grooves without a bass. The Kills do it
brilliantly.
“Blood Pressures” is first
and foremost percussion driven. Sure there are good guitar grooves and Alison
Mosshart’s voice is angst-ridden and awesome but these songs are really about
the rhythm and the beat. It isn’t just the drum, either. The layered guitar
riffs are equally responsible for creating the ever-present thump. The result
is a band that on each song finds new and innovative ways to create old
fashioned rock and roll with a twist.
The layering is clever and
the various sounds they pull together would sound weird on their own, but
combined make for a great sound. On “Heart
is a Beating Drum” it sounds like they sample the sound of a ping pong
table. I found myself liking it.
Mosshart has one of rock and
roll’s great voices. She has great timing and instinctively knows how to find
the groove. Despite the great timing, her vocals are raw and dirty, with a
bluesy growl that makes you feel like you need a shower after listening.
Great tracks abound, but I
tend to like the more up tempo ones. The album starts with “Future Starts Slow” which is typical in
terms of what the album offers lyrically:
“You can holler, you can wail
You can swing, you can flail
You can thump like a broken sail.”
These songs aren’t
narratives, they are emotional moments caught in time, with sparse but well-chosen
imagery like the thumping sail above.
Another favourite is “Nail in My Coffin” which perfectly
captures that moment where Mosshart gives a man the classic “I’m no good”
warning, and maybe accuses him of the same.
“I am no better at this than you are
Unfinished business may be due love.
I can’t change myself into you dear
What you are to me is far too unclear
“Could be a nail in my coffin
And I don’t need another one.”
This is a warning – the character
is damaged goods, so pursue that tangled emotional mess at your peril. At the
same time, it is clear Mosshart is inviting the very disaster she purports to
swear off. The tension of that space between is held up by the song, which has
a groove that is seductive on the surface, and dissonant in its depths.
The production on the record
is thick but a bit overly fuzzy in places where I wanted it to be crisp. I can’t
decide if I liked it or I didn’t like it so I’ll split the difference and say I
kinda liked it but it is never so overt that it wrecks the experience.
When I first bought this
album back in 2011 it got seriously over-listened, and so I’ve tried to give myself
time away lately so I can rehabilitate it. It was great to roll it on the
Odyssey and remind myself there is no reason to stay away.
Best
tracks: Future Starts Slow, Heart is a Beating Drum,
Nail in My Coffin, DNA, Baby Says
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