The Kills - 'Keep On Your Mean Side' (Domino)
5/5
By: Toby L
Long one of our hot-tips of last year for a surge of affluent notoriety, The Kills' debut long-player - 'Keep On Your Mean Side' - seems set to deliver the goods needed for their name to be converted from that of a title associated with 'hopeful', to - in one extravagant swoop - 'classic'.
You'll think that you'd have seen it all, too, by the time you pick up a copy of the record in question, but - whoa - how wrong can an informed music-fan be..? VV and Hotel are rock's most forceful, compulsive, innovative and - weirdly - retro-via-modern act to have existed for years.
'Keep...' doesn't fail. Not even once. It's the rare species of record that you just know will gleam magically for the whole duration, from the sultry shudder of 'Superstition', right on to their thrilling calling-card, 'Cat Claw', both bandaged together via a heavily distorted recording of our female-singer coughing and performing resultant, profanity-stricken utterances on a Dictaphone. The action never lets up beyond this - inclusive of the fervent stomp of 'Pull A U' (with its irresistible refrain of 'I'm not trying to wake you up...'), upcoming hooks-burdened single 'Fried My Little Brains', and chilling, on-the-highway panache of 'Kissy Kissy' ('It's been a long time coming,' they insist - no shit, guys: this really, truly has been).
At times, what reigns most striking is the sheer intimacy of the work; sure, you could expect as much from a boy-girl duo sharing vocal-duties, and a mere guitar and drum-machine - but there's a starkness, depth and warmth to proceedings that proves far more difficult to trace. The twelve tracks, recorded in a mere couple of weeks in the East End's revitalised Toerag Studios, although only unified in a sleazy-blues barrage of licks and shady gloominess, segue together in a unique intensity and genuinely deserved assurance that causes an immediate, blanketing segregation between the pair and every other band presently in existence.
The latter stages of the work, similarly, fail to wane, lurching from the staring-straight-at-you urgency of 'Hitched', riotous 'F**k The People', and almost heart-breaking 'Wait', a rare moment of poignancy only excelled by a show-closing 'Gypsy Death & You': a touching, acoustic-based ode that proves there's far more to load into The Kills' cannon than a series of scales and attested attitude.
A rare album that could - to equal levels of triumph - soundtrack a wired house-party, or even a pair of headphones late in the evening, the twosome's dynamic may be one hard to put a finger on, but as long as it's documented so truthfully and enchantingly on recording as this, then there's little in the way of disappointment to anticipate... The party starts here - who's to know when, how or where it will end?
Artists in this article: The Kills
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