Midnight Thrills

In case it wasn’t already obvious from the name, The Kills don’t do subtle, sly or nuanced. Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince prefer to inflict trauma, letting their sleazy, staccato riffs stand largely unadorned. Onstage, their message is as explicit as it is potent, Mosshart’s eyes obscured by her curtain-like bangs while Hince strangles the neck of his guitar. It would be easy to assume that this kind of showmanship comes naturally to The Kills—that they themselves are as inhumanly assured as their sound. Yet the truth is that Mosshart continues to battle stage fright, even so many years removed from the band’s first shows.

“When we first started playing, I was really nervous,” Mosshart says by phone. “It was hard for me to look at the audience or pay much attention to them without wanting to run to a dark spot on the stage. I’m a little less nervous now, but it’s still there.” Mosshart has reason to be more nervous than most. As a duo—Mosshart and Hince share vocal and guitar duties—The Kills are forced to rely on a drum machine for every song in concert. To hear Mosshart tell it, the experience is a bit like walking across a high wire without a safety net. “You have one shot at it, and if you mess up, you really can’t get back to where you were going,” she says. The perpetual fear of making that irreversible error “never really goes away.”

Fortunately, The Kills are a band founded on the concept of meeting fear head on. They came into being after Mosshart’s former outfit, the Florida-based pop-punk outfit Discount, called it a day. Rather than take the safe way out and find a steady 9-to-5 job, the then 20-year-old Mosshart opted for a leap of faith: She moved to London to recruit Hince as her songwriting partner. She had briefly met Hince while fronting Discount and remembered being particularly struck by his talent. And even though she had only spoken to him for a couple of hours, “I just knew I wanted to play music with him, so I moved [to London] to force the issue.”

Rechristening themselves VV and Hotel, Mosshart and Hince booked a series of shows under the newly assumed names to hone their stripped-down, garage-y sound. Both were apparently eager to sever ties with their pasts. “I had just been touring for seven years with [Discount] and I didn’t want to get gigs on the basis of what I had done before,” she says. “I didn’t want my old band’s name to be on every flyer. I didn’t want Jamie’s bands to be on every flyer. We didn’t want any baggage.” The band finally settled on The Kills as the name for their new musical endeavor, and not too long after, the band was snapped up by the reputable Rough Trade label.

While The Kills, now on Domino Records, have deservedly earned their reputation as a ferocious live act over the years, accolades for their albums have been slower to come. Although all three records are accomplished, none manages to sustain the bottled intensity of a full Kills live set. Befitting a band that thrives on the spontaneity of live performance, The Kills are at their best in short bursts, whether it’s the lacerating call-and-response of “Cat Claw” off their full-length debut, 2003’s Keep on Your Mean Side, or the quixotic, bluesy howl of “Last Day of Magic” from the just-released Midnight Boom.

Midnight Boom qualifies as their most fully realized album to date, moving ever so slightly away from the garage aesthetic that characterized their first two records and embracing a more modern, beats-based approach. Much has been made of the involvement of Armani XXXchange (Alex Epton) from Spank Rock, but Mosshart insists that the album was essentially complete by the time he arrived. “Alex was with us for 10 days out of the year-and-a-half [spent] writing this record,” she says. “He came in after everything was done to help us because we like using computers for music and he knows how to do it. We just didn’t have the patience for it.”

Midnight Boom showcases a whimsical side to The Kills that was absent on previous albums (and some might say onstage). Some of that playfulness is evident in the slapdash beats, but also in Mosshart’s surreal, nonsensical lyrics, as on “Cheap and Cheerful”: “You can’t survive on ice cream / You got to see me dancing dog.”

Still, as expansive as it might be for The Kills, Midnight Boom remains, at its core, a blues-based guitar rock record, and that suits Mosshart just fine. “We both really like simple music. I’ve always thought that the more you put on something, the more you’re hiding.”