Keep On Your Mean Side

It's rough times for these bluesy guy-girl garage duos, I tell ya. I mean, sure, if you're the least bit talented you've got a massive hype machine working for you-- which isn't a bad thing-- but you'll never shake those comparisons to the band that built the boat you're sailing. I promise not to mention of the W\x97S\x97 , maybe as a favor to The Kills, but mostly because the two bands sound nothing alike.

Regardless, the Kills won't need to fish for complimentary comparisons; suckers are jumping out of the water. I'll be damned if vocalist VV (nee Alison Mosshart) doesn't have a picture of PJ Harvey at her bedside, and the same goes double for instrumentalist Hotel (Londoner Jamie Hince) re: Neil Hagerty. These influences aren't as disparate as they seem: while Harvey and the Royal Trux worked on different sides of the fidelity line, they were both attempting expansive, ambitious modern updates of the blues. The Kills' aim is just about the opposite; despite the stylistic similarities, they're trying to return the pillaged form to its simpler roots.

Though their minimalism might sometimes sound like straight distillation, the tunes still hit, and hurt. On the second track, \x93Cat's Claw\x94, the raised hackles of V.V.'s voice roughly brush up against Hotel's descending string of power chords, and the \x93Got it, I want it\x94 chorus sinks its rusty sing-along hooks into your lips with stoned rapacity. On this song-- and as a rule-- The Kills offer strictly verse/chorus stuff, with a few careening bars of guitar skree passing for a bridge. Oddly, this is what makes the song great, just as the Jesus and Mary Chain distortion of the record's opener lines a wordlessly yowled chorus like lace on an exquisite corpse's casket, pulling the song beyond the confines of a boxy garage, out into the dark streets.

The band knows when-- and more importantly how-- to augment their simplicity, but it's a shame they don't use this gift more often. It's not that any of these songs fail, at least in the rock and roll or blues departments, but there's a point where minimalism can easily turn hollow. The lockstep lyric and riff repetition of \x93Black Rooster\x94 wears itself out quickly, begging for variation about three minutes in, but the band keeps pushing straight ahead. And no matter how much enthusiasm the band pours into it, the titular mantra of \x93Fuck the People\x94 still sounds like nothing more than a predicate pose. Like their pseudonyms, the band's shove-it adherence to a few glib phrases and riffs is going stale; it's still good, but once in a while, you catch a whiff of lazy, empty self-mythologizing.

But even a hollow brick can knock you out cold: there's enough hypnotic arm-wrestling in the slippery back-and-forth rhythm of \x93Hitched\x94 to drop a cruiserweight critic, and-- despite the minimalist posture-- there's enough thematic variation to make things interesting. \x93Kissy Kissy\x94, for instance, starts with a ringing guitar figure that almost sounds more at home in the Ganges Delta than the Mississippi, before following its thudding drums into doomsville. Though few and far between, the numbers where the band slows down and eases back on the attitude are things of beauty; \x93Wait\x94, the album's longest and most repetitive track, makes perfect use of the yearning core of V.V.'s tough, stripped voice, stretching seductive curiosity into two-chord cosmic foreplay. The final track, \x93Gypsy Death and You\x94, is in a similar vein, V.V. and Hotel using only voice, acoustic guitar, and insistent, reverbed drum hits to sketch their own halfway-to-sober version of ramshackle folk.

If they should break through to the mainstream, The Kills probably deserve it more than most. Their poses are balanced with enough genuine emotion to approach the sum of their influences; they play with more style and flair than almost any band in a scene where the former is usually all that matters. Still, it's a bitter reality: they'd never be getting this kind of attention if it weren't for the White Stri-- fuck!