The American girl is called VV. She’s skinny and pale, and her black-and-white-striped shirt is ripped, a lit cigarette poking out from behind a veil of jet-black, shoulder-length hair. She wears faded jeans and cowboy boots. When she swipes her hair aside, her face is pretty in a shy, feral, Winona-getting-arrested-for-shoplifting kinda way. The British guy, Hotel, looks older and plainer, receding close-cropped hairline and tattered Members Only jacket: you wonder what the hell she’s doing hanging around the geezer, at least until he starts playing guitar. He steps on a pedal and the drum machine kicks in, a skittering runaway heartbeat. Steps on another and the guitar coughs up a lung. The girl clings to the microphone stand as if it were an IV pole and shakes, smoking. She looks a bit like Patti Smith possessed by the spirit of Steven Tyler. Her scream is a low, dry, rattling rasp that arches up and out into a hair-raising, Tyler-esque shriek.

Last Friday night upstairs at the Middle East, there was something all too timely about watching an Anglo-American coalition who call themselves the Kills. But unlike the killers half a world away, it’s not clear that these combatants are on the same side — more as if they were at each other’s throats. Love, as they say, is a battlefield. And as Hotel clangs away at the chunking, ultraheavy doom blues of " Pull a U, " from the Kills’ debut, Keep on Your Mean Side (Rough Trade), he scowls and stalks VV across the stage. She glares back at him, convulses, spits something accusatory with a smoldering, PJ Harvey–like caw: " Your black magic and your two-dollar love. " On " Cat’s Claw, " she howls at him, " You got it/I want it, " and now she’s stalking him, grabbing his shirt, shoving him backwards. Is this desire?

The Kills have shtick, and it’s good shtick: one-on-one sexual warfare. As gritty as PJ’s Four Track Demos and as junk-sultry as Royal Trux, their thrusts and scrapes and stabs enact an ominous portrait of fear, betrayal, frustration, lust, and dread that registers at the level of the flesh. For " Kissy Kissy, " an evil, thunderstruck country blues, they set up their microphones at a face-to-face cross-angle, so that they’re singing at each other: " It’s been a long time coming/Gonna stab your kissy, kissy mouth, " they both hiss, and the way they size each other up, it’s difficult to tell whether they’re long-lost lovers on the verge of coitus or sworn enemies about to rip each other to shreds.