Mixtape Monday Bonus: The Kills

So when I posted a Kills song on my mix this morning, I had no idea that they had a new album coming out in March, or that they just put out a brand-new single. I’ve just been listening to them a lot lately because I’ve been moody and sick lately, and they make the kind of angry songs that lend themselves to a long winter locked in one’s bedroom.

VV and Hotel are the pseudonyms of an American woman and an Englishman who make spare, bluesy music with angry guitars and a minimal drum machine. They smoke lots of cigarettes and occasionally puke onstage. They’re vegans. They don’t really do interviews, and their music sounds like what might happen if you set a couple of Depeche Mode fans loose in West Virginia for a year. In other words, they sound a lot like early PJ Harvey. It sounds a little bit like they like shooting up the smack, too. They get compared to the White Stripes a lot, too, because there’s two of them and they’re a little bit bluesy. It’s a valid comparison, but the kills are way darker and a lot more sincere.

It’s great music if you’re feeling angsty in a teenaged way, or if you’re having cheap sex in a dirty motel with the sleazy man you hired to kill your husband. For instance. It’s very cinematic. But I ignored them when their first album (Keep On Your Mean Side) came out in 2003, because the Stills and the Thrills and about sixty-seven other bands with similar names all came out right then and I didn’t have the patience to sort them apart. It’s too bad, because the Kills sound is totally unlike the swoopy-banged dance-punk or lame indie-folk that was all the rage at the time.

The first time I actually noticed the pair’s creepy music was during the end credits of Jacques Audiard’s wonderful thriller The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The song, Monkey 23, is creepy and slow, cocky but thoughtfully so, just like the movie.

The next time I heard them was when their version of I Call It Art appeared on the amazingly uneven Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited compilation, which featured Serge’s hits done both wonderfully (by Portishead and Franz Ferdinand) and dreadfully (by Cat Power and Jarvis Cocker.) Of all the songs, though, I Call It Art (an adaptation of Gainsbourg’s Chanson de slogan) is the only one I feel any urge to listen to these days.

Finally, it occurred to me to look in to their albums–all two of them–and they’re both really good, if a little bit similar to one another. Judging from the sound of their new single, the third album might be more of the same, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I can’t think of anybody else–especially PJ Harvey and the White Stripes–who makes music quite like this these days.

Oh, and if you’re the kind of person who likes to make remixes, you can go here and download the vocals for the new single. (You can also go there to see the video, which is pretty neat, too.)

The Kills, Monkey 23 (from Keep On Your Mean Side)
The Kills, Jewel Thief (from the Fried My Little Brains single)
The Kills, Dead Road 7 (from No Wow)
The Kills, Passion Is Accurate (from the Love Is A Deserter single)
The Kills, I Call It Art (from Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited)
The Kills, URA Fever (the new single from Midnight Boom, out in March on Domino)

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