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THE KILLS
ROYALLY TRUCKED

There’s no mistaking a certain blatant fondness for the driest of Dry-era PJ Harvey grrrl punk blooze in the primal guitar surges and insolent, alluring vocal interplay on the new Kills album, No Wow (Rough Trade). Guitarist Jamie Hince clearly had a 50-foot queenie on his mind when he hooked up with Florida ex-pat Alison Mosshart and, with only a rudimentary drum machine keeping time, started cranking out raw, reverb-drenched riffs dark and nasty enough to rub Mosshart’s bad-girl attitude till it, uh, bled. Fortunately, there’s more to the Kills than a simple PJ Harvey fetish. People have pointed the White Stripes finger at Hince, whose Kills moniker is Hotel, and Mosshart, who goes by VV, for reasons almost too obvious to mention — no bass, blues riffs. But Hince’s roots go deeper than that: his drum machine, which tends to pulse unobtrusively more often than it hammers out beats, has Suicide written all over it. And you don’t have to read between Mosshart’s lines for all the heroin references to catch a whiff of vintage Royal Trux junk rock here — one look at the distinctive Jennifer Herrema bangs-over-the-eyes hairdo she’s adopted for her VV persona says it all.

One could argue that the whole doesn’t add up to much more than the sum of the Kills’ borrowed parts on No Wow and their 2003 debut album, Keep on Your Mean Side (Rough Trade). But on stage at the Paradise Sunday at an indier-than-thou show that had the balcony closed and silly little Scout Niblett stumbling through an opening set that ended in frustration when she couldn’t tune her guitar, the Kills simply killed. In black jeans and an oversized T-shirt, VV laid down the law with a line from "No Wow" that could have been directed at an ex-lover or at the attentive crowd — "You’re gonna have to step over my dead body before you walk out that door." At that point, leaving didn’t seem a wise option, especially since the tension between Ms. VV and Mr. Hotel started heating up right away. They’d moved their mike stands so that they were facing each other by the time they tore through the call-and-response of "I Hate the Way You Love" and "I Hate the Way You Love Pt. 2" back to back.

A strict moralist might take the Kills to task for their unabashed celebration of junk culture. But real rock and roll is a dirty business. You gotta be willing to get a little bloody every now and again. And nasty, too. For the encore, Mosshart lay down, legs spread, as Hince coaxed feedback from a guitar pressed between her thighs. There’s love here — it’s just not the sugarcoated romance of Nick and Jessica’s tidy Newlyweds fantasy world.

BY MATT ASHARE

Issue Date: April 15 - 21, 2005
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