You’ll Never Get To Heaven With Your Shirt All Torn

The Kills “At The Back Of The Shell” – This is pretty much exactly what I wanted from a new record by The Kills. They’ve toned down the faux-70s rock sleaze and indulged in their fondness for tense, stark rhythms and sexy come-ons. It’s getting harder to confuse them with Royal Trux, and easier to accept them as being something far greater than fodder for glossy magazine pictorials. And oh God, I love the sound of this girl’s voice. (Click here to visit the official Kills site.)

i-Wolf & Burdy “Urban Gypsy” – Marvel Comics used to publish a series called What If…? in which a huge bald guy called Uatu The Watcher (no, not that kind of Watcher) was charged with observing the Earth and sworn never to interfere with the events taking place on the planet (though he routinely broke this vow in the pages of the Fantastic Four). Every month, Uatu presented an alternate version of the Marvel Universe in which a turn of events from regular continuity had gone differently and resulted in, almost invariably, a horrific nightmare world where everything had gone terribly wrong. I loved this comic as a kid, in part because it helped me develop a better understanding of the mythology of the Marvel Universe, but mostly because it was such a downer. I absolutely loved (and still do, actually) seeing heroes suffer in fiction, which I’m now certain is a direct result of seeing The Empire Strikes Back as a toddler. Even as a child, I seemed to recognize that villains win more often than not, and that good people usually have to struggle to earn just a tiny bit of justice. I think that another part of the series’ appeal was that it only ever offered the endings to stories, whereas every other monthly comic book series is forever trapped in the middle of a seemingly infinite ongoing storyline.

Anyway, I’m way off track here. I was only invoking this old comic book series to suggest that this song sounds like it could be the (non-horrific) answer to the question “What if…Boney M had collaborated with Primal Scream circa XTRMNTR?” (Click here to buy it from Juno.)