The Kills - 'Blood Pressures' (Domino) Released: 04/04/11

Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince often get it in the neck for trying too hard to be cool. What a load of bollocks! If the bloke who bagged Kate Moss and the girl who demoted Jack White to a mere drummer aren’t cool, no questions asked, then what hope does that spell for the rest of us?

I may as well shave off my handlebar moustache right now for all it is worth.

Right The Kills are to wallow in their blues-stomp swagger and on ‘Blood Pressures’ their lurching brand of sultry rock is sounding beefier than ever thanks to a hefty production job by both Hince and Bill Skibbe (Oasis, The Dead Weather and Shellac).

Lead single ‘Satellite’ is a bona fide corker and the LP’s high watermark, carving a deliciously menacing crunch out of Hince’s devilish licks and Mosshart’s ever-sultry croon, “Operator, operator, dial her back, operator put me through.”

‘Nail In My Coffin’, ‘Future Starts Slow’, and indeed most of the album, plough a similarly squalid furrow but the results are fertile enough to justify a strict adherence to the sound of a lingering kiss-off.
If ‘Blood Pressures’ does much to differentiate itself from the rest of The Kills’ back catalogue, it’s to present a much brasher front than ever before. Where once Mosshart and Hince seemed self-contained in their bubble of agitated suave, the likes of ‘Future Starts Slow’ and ‘Pots and Pans’ showcase a last band in town lashing out at the world rather than in upon themselves.

Where The Kills do veer into balladeering, they perhaps unsurprisingly come undone. While Mosshart’s voice is built for primal hollering, the same can’t be said for the restrained paino-lead ‘The Last Goodbye’. Hince himself fares no better on the roughshod sixties hark back ‘Wild Charms’.

Nevertheless, there’s no mistaking the fact that ‘Blood Pressures’ writhes with a remarkable amount of life for a band on their fourth record.

Convention states it shouldn’t matter how hip a band are so long as their music stacks up to an enlightened standard. The sordid truth of the matter however, is that The Kills couldn’t have made a record as delectable as ‘Blood Pressures’ without stamping their strut of nonchalance all over it.
 
Jealously simply won’t stop Hince and Mosshart leaving us all in the lurch. We’ve simply got to catch up.