Smoking kills

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The Kills deny they're a couple, though they've shared an awful lot together; near identical record collections, an apartment and art space in London. They flirt with the idea of releasing their ids with their onstage ID's in displays of lusty tease and adolescently violent swoops and snarls. They crank up the sexual tension with libidinal music that thumps and palpitates, groans and caterwauls, and a performance that tempts and infers but never goes all the way. They will circle each other, breath down each other's necks, storm off in a huff, but never kiss and make up and certainly not ever get down to it. Instead, all that energy gets channeled into the music. And, really, who cares about that whole White Stripes angle anyway? Though, let's face it, it worked for the Detroit couple and does for The Kills on some level, and I'm about to harp a bit. Apologies. So, just say they are a couple, well, maybe it's a tax thing and they wish people would stop bringing it up and drawing attention to their living circumstances...or do they? And if they're not a couple, maybe they enjoy the game of a good conspiracy, and anyway, there's nothing like the "us vs. them" feeling to tighten a bond, particularly for these two on stage facing crowds of hundreds to thousands, facing the media and their own demons. Enough.
They've been on the road now since April 2005. They began their world tour, leaving a trail of cigarette butts through North America, the UK, Europe and South America, then started all over again in September. We got the tail end of their tour in December last year when I went to see them at Ding Dong, supported by Witch Hats and Damn Arms.
The Kills have quickly become the edgey rock darlings (paradoxically) of the mainstream music media, despite or perhaps because of their dismissive attitude to rock journalism. Back in their earlier days, VV derided the vast majority of popular press as "embarrassing.. a joke.. and boring." They still keep it to a low roar, but MTV have been graced with a look-in. In their few years on the circuit, The Kills have vented their spleens and stoked each other's shared obsessive and perfectionist natures, pacing their way back and forth into a higher profile and larger listening audience, particularly after the release of Keep On Your Mean Side, which attracted widespread interest and has been re-affirmed now with their latest, No Wow.
VV has been likened to PJ Harvey, particularly after the release of Fried My Little Brains, which bears some husk of similarity to Britain's depressed, groaning woman of rock. Both PJ Harvey and The Kills are similarly influenced by Captain Beefheart, but like Harvey, Mosshart seems to have taken her cues more from the likes of Patti Smith vocally, with her serious intonation, barbed tonality and drawn-out curling enunciation.
I missed the first band, and was appropriately chided by the second, Damn Arms. Their set was another eightiesesque clash of punk pop and disco popularised by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and all the rest from New York. There's a bit of the new romantic also, not just in the keys but the hair. One of the band members even makes something of a statement, rallying up the other tight jean clad kids with "hair" (who constitute the vast majority in this room - I mean sure, we've all got hair, but only some of us have "hair") to retaliate against some backlash against this look that he and his like-dressed crowd has born the brunt of. Talk about preaching to the converted. Maybe it's all become so post-sarcastic that I missed the irony? But they seemed earnest enough about tight black jeans and "hair" and raised a little interest with their energetic set.
After they finished, I was suddenly swamped as the spring tide of the audience came in for The Kills. And then on they come with their trademark drum machine kicking out the fidgetty twitch of No Wow.
The stage is hardly lit at all, just a few red beams shooting below their heads to their chests, leaving their faces to glimpes and imagination as they dart forward or climb the foldback to stand and sight the chorus.
Hince's ricochet guitar, a blustering, biting sound created by a well-chosen set of effects pedals snarls and shudders metallically with tough appropriations of blues riffs, in the bent tradition of Beefheart's guitarists.
Mosshart paces the stage, pursed-lipped, a bandage around her right hand decorated with an X made of two bandaids, but despite the limb being frail, it's still good for holding a cigarette with. They don't really speak at all save to sparingly offer gratitude for the turnout and Hince mentions that Australia is the last leg of a world tour, thanking us again for our response.
Certainly, this was a reasonably good gangly-legged turnout for The Kills, known for their tense shows and their penchant for being seconds away from devouring each other. It's widely discussed that The Kills come up much better live than they do recorded, and that their albums lack the electricity created together live. I have to say, that listening to the album in headphones as opposed to seeing them live doesn't really offer much of an argument and that sound-wise they pretty much get it, but energy wise there's the onstage dynamic of role-playing between the two that is lost in the recording. But how do you reproduce that?
Hotel likes to make believe he's shooting VV with his guitar and sometimes she goes along with it with a little spasm of "oh I've been shot". Then she'll stalk him down and there'll be a face in each other's face stand-off, then she'll be stand-offish and sing to the lighting rig instead, then turn and crouch submissively, then crawl up and beg at his knees, get shot again or practically molested with the guitar and so the onstage drama goes... and people lap it up.
VV spent the dimly lit, smouldering show rarely showing her face, using her long dark hair to hide behind. Inspired by the sparkly silver glam rock curtains of Ding Dong, she climbed nimbly up onto a rear stage bass foldback speaker and perched ready to pounce, swishing the material around herself to hide and then flounce into vision. It does all seem like kids games for adults. And it makes you wonder, after being on the road playing gigs night after night, like any sexual play or performance, how much of it, beyond the obvious fixture of the drum machine and song structure becomes routine? Sex on a Tuesday, so to speak. The reputation they have kindled proceeds them and therefore they have set up for themselves high expectations which was evident in the keen eyes of the audience.
After opening with the two recent singles, No Wow and The Good Ones, they built up the set tensely, the sultry Kissy Kissy pulling us ever closer to the clincher of the Fried My Little Brains stomp with the end of verse hook of guitar and vocal line bending in unison. There are plenty of arms in the air now reaching out as VV's hair whooshes by and Hotel stamps his heel into the trembling stage. Hince opens the closer (Love Is A Deserter) with harsh flourishes of guitar enunciated by biting at the air. Face glazed in sweat and headlights he launches into the riff and Mosshart and he collide for the shared vocals between boosting themselves up on foldback wedges. Hotel aims his guitar and squeezes the life out of you while VV toys with you in a game of cat and mouse.
These kids sure have been working and smoking hard, leaving a trail of smoke in their restless tow, and both of them are sweating profusely. Mosshart drags her big cowboy boots across stage for another drag of nicotine as Hince takes on the crowd with his guitar, appropriating the disco classic Funky Town farcically into the middle 8 of Love Is A Deserter.
Proving not only to have a sense of humour but also a sense of graciousness, The Kills depart with thank yous. Proving to be generous, they return to half of the room's enthusiasm (well, it is Melbourne) to play an encore ending with their cover of Beefheart's Dropout Boogie, which they covered for Black Rooster (back in the Northern Hemisphere's summer of 02-03). It's a chunky rendition, not retreating from the beat for the off-kilter key melody like the original, but plowing through it in meter with full chords. Despite their world-tour weariness, stopping or fizzling out is not part of the manifesto and they give the crowd exactly the kind of rock show ending the front dwellers had been craving, taking them all the way to the end with plenty of crash and burn, scream, steam, feedback, fagged-out fury and of course another fag. And when VV and Hotel finally do begin to tire and nod off, we hope they remember to put out their cigarettes first.

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Short but not sweet

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Oakes squanders the first paragraph on a rambling tirade bemoaning the fact that the music of bands like Madness has proved less influential than that of other less significant (in Oakes's unsupported opinion) groups. He then follows with a 36 word second paragraph that essentially says little more than: "Gee, Madness were good."

The final paragraph contains the essence of Oakes's position: the new album isn't very good. "Why?" you may well ask. According to Mr. Oakes because it is "…soulless and overproduced." In what way? Can you give some examples? What do you actually mean by these two vague and undefined terms? Sadly the only answer provided to these questions is silence.

Could Dan Oakes have said more? Well given that his 151 words can be summed up by "Madness good, other early 80's bands bad, people should realise this, I don't like their new album". He is left with, by my count, 134 words in which to say something.

Limited space is not an excuse for lack of substance. On the contrary, it should focus the reviewer on the necessity of providing some.

Read Dan Oakes' original review.

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