Features
The Kills
By Eric Allen
Apr 29, 2008, 12:07

The Kills
No Strangers To Danger

Allison Mosshart of The Kills is perplexed by my question. Not perplexed, but perhaps troubled by what she thinks my journalistic intentions are. “A lot of people want to lump Jamie (Hince, Mosshart’s bandmate) and I into this category with The White Stripes,” she says with a sigh after being asked about their supposed sexual tension. “We’ve known each other for ten years. I think we know our place.” This is the voice of someone who's tired of the press offering up exhausted comparisons to man and wife duos. But The Kills are just best friends. That’s it.

“We make jokes about pushing each other’s wheel chairs,” Mosshart says about the duo’s relationship.

This friendship, one which was struck up in an English squat over ten years ago, is the basis for one of the more creative bands to come about in rock ‘n’ roll in a few years. The duo take dangerous stabs at playing grimy Velvet Underground and Modern Lovers indie-rock, while a drum machine acts as the group's invisible third member. While many have taken the formula set by these aforementioned proto-punks and played them out to death, The Kills are re-writing these standards, making them their own.  

“Ideas are dangerous. People completely expressing themselves and being totally creative and imaginative is dangerous,” Mosshart says about the stagnant and shallow waters of music. “It’s about being dangerous outside of the dressing room. I want something that blows my mind and that I can’t stop thinking about.”

This is clearly the idea and message behind The Kills' latest record, Midnight Boom. The duo’s third record is stacked with 12 edgy rock jaunts — they're impressively dangerous compared to the standards of Lou Reed’s “Waiting For My Man” and “Heroin.” Songs like “U.R.A Fever” and “Sour Cherry” sound like the night you gambled with your life and went raw on a crack whore while her pimp pushed a gun in your mouth.

The feeling of the album, much of which was written and recorded in Benton Harbor, Michigan, is a stark contrast to what the band experienced while the record was in production. Made in the nearly vacant town that resides on the west coast of the state, The Kills produced material in a situation that was quite unlike their fashionable hometowns of London and New York. “There is nothing in the town. It’s full of houses falling down, but it’s also full of these really grand 600 room hotels that have been empty since the '70s,” Mosshart says when reflecting on their home during the recording of Midnight Boom. “There is this feeling that it’s a total ghost town. It could be quite scary sometimes. There are some characters around there.”

The band spent much of their time holed up in the studio producing music at night and sleeping by day. The album's title is a nod to novelist Jack Kerouac, but also represents how the band would make music and become creative once midnight hit. “We would stay up 'til ten o’clock in the morning working on stuff. It seemed like we hit our creative stride around midnight,” Mosshart says of their vampire-like schedule. “It’s not like there was any reason to go out or anything. There’s nothing going on.”  | RDW

The Kills • 5/7 • The Magic Stick

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