The Kills Blood Pressures

The Kills? You love them, or you hate them. Either you adore their finger-in-every-goddamn-pie approach, or it gets you like nothing else. However, they represent so much more than some skinny jeaned marmite of the music industry – after all that’s a label we could happily grant to Justin Bieber right now. No, so much more: Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart are very interesting people and as a band they have made three highly consistent albums, the last of which, Midnight Boom is about as guilty pleasure as indie rock can be. So it’s with a great frothing mixture of emotion that I must tell that Blood Pressures, their fourth record, is both more of the same and something different. I say that because there’s no questioning that this pair does what they do well: a White Stripes with an underground cool and, judging by recent events, more stamina to boot. Their sound is so simple: 1, 2 drum-machine rhythms, no frills fuzz guitars, and just Mosshart’s slow-burning forcefulness as lead to make their sound whole; in fact so distinct is the sound that there is just nothing truly like it. However, there’s no doubting the style has shifted through the years, through art-rock to a more garage-blues based tone; nonetheless it remains as recognizable as ever, as Blood Pressures demonstrates with great success.

So Blood Pressures is The Kills through and through, and yet they’ve added more stomp and blues to the instrumentation, a more rugged edge than the one that so invitingly welded itself to our ears on the last album. The wearying, trudging brilliance of Satellite; or the shuddering riffs of The Heart is Beating Drum provide convincing evidence of that.

Where it strays further is that for all the tongue-poking fun of Midnight Boom, this record feels far more sincere, and while it’s so very abstract in the way they always have been, there’s a sense of some cathartic release here: for example on the excellent Nail In My Coffin, when Mosshart cries in a wounded, pleading defence “[it] could be a nail in my coffin / and I don’t need another one! / could be a nail in my coffin / and Lord knows, I ain’t ready yet!” It feels, first and foremost, like they’ve found something they want to say.

And it’s with such an aphorism that the deafening mechanism of the album slowly begins to give way to music that explores newer qualities and influences. Jamie is even given a rare and worthwhile solo outing on Wild Charms; Mosshart displays her charms on the all-permeating, muggy, breathless blues of the wonderful Baby Says, a feeling that pervades inexorably through the album.

The only shame is the problem that has always dogged The Kills: it’s never an entirely comfortable first spin with them, and that speed-bump tends to be the dissuading factor for too many listeners, but if you just drive on by and persevere a little while, Blood Pressures will pay its way and more.

It also forms another reminder that Mosshart is really one of the finest (and most underrated) front-women around right now, a podium place confirmed by her work with The Dead Weather. I’d go as far as to say she’d even be one with Karen O if such heroics weren’t straight-jacketed by her own cool. Her cigarette snarl and Hince’s backing growl cut well with the bluesier rub of this record and in that respect it certainly feels a triumph. Blood Pressures is a compelling forty minutes, and by the time we reach the closer, Pots and Pans, with a slider and twelve bar riffs to accompany its sultry, resonant admissions, you can barely imagine them any other way.