Love Is Just A Dialogue

The Kills “Cheap and Cheerful” – At first blush, the Kills seem like rock-oriented “fashion people,” which is basically a more elite version of what Mike Barthel calls “rock people.” If you never cared about them, this may be the reason why — their music is devoid of tweeness, and their detached, debauched persona can be off-putting if you’re the type of person who has trouble connecting with glamor or irony. But here’s the thing: While there will never be a shortage of skinny, good looking people going for the “sexy fucked-up rock star” look, very few of them will ever make compelling music that both dissects that image and lives inside it in the present tense. To an extent, the Kills have already accomplished that on their previous two records, but their new album Midnight Boom is where it really comes together, and the aesthetic and emotional tensions at the heart of their work escalates dramatically.

All of the songs on Midnight Boom are at the intersection of nostalgia and invention. Every track is informed by the nagging feeling that everything in your reality is wrong, and not quite good enough, and that at some point, things were much more exciting and romantic, but you missed it, and therefore must fabricate your own version of it in your own time. The songs aren’t about living out a fantasy, they’re about trying to force your life into one. It’s about recognizing the way fiction often sets the parameters for reality, and attempting to take advantage of it in order to escape a life of endless quotidian boredom. It’s the struggle between perception and fantasy, and living with the awareness that even after reinventing yourself, the world isn’t going to change all that much with you. Reality can be tampered with, but it won’t ever fully bend to your will.

More than anything, the Kills are aiming for a state of extreme romance, and so the songs that charge headlong into relationship drama (“Last Day Of Magic”) or indulge in excessive nostalgia (“What New York Used To Be”) are the most desperate and urgent. In those songs, and a few others, the dynamics become queasy and uncomfortable, and simulate the feeling of the mind moving faster than the body can handle, or vice versa. Much of this comes down to Jamie Hince’s skill for crafting tracks that emphasize visceral sensation, and are full of synthetic effects that make standard guitar moves sound just a bit unreal. His tones echo the general theme of fabrication — guitar parts are meant to evoke the sound of, say, scuzzy punk circa the early ’80s, but there’s no attempt to hide the digital patina, or take the listener out of this moment in time. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)