KILLS - No Wow

Alison "VV" Mosshart and Jamie "Hotel" Hince, she American, he British. In 2003 they debuted with the blistering album "Keep On Your Mean Side" (preceded the year before by the Ep "Black Rooster"), and pretty much everywhere their visceral blend of blues and electronics won over critics and fans alike: minimal, stripped-back sounds paired with an obsessive vocal delivery that, in VV's case, recalled early PJ Harvey. It has to be said that their success rode in on the wave generated by the White Stripes with "Elephant", an act to which critics mistakenly linked them right away. As in that case, we're dealing with a duo with a pronounced taste for vintage lo-fi, reclaiming the blues sounds of rock's origins without baroque overstructuring or glossy arrangements.

What perhaps went unnoticed back then, and what "No Wow" makes much clearer, is that The Kills' music filters Delta blues through new wave textures, combining two seemingly opposite musical worlds: rock's most visceral origins with what was once the negation of everything rock had been up to that point. Hotel recently stated that for his instrumental parts on the new album he wanted to use an old Moog instead of the band's well-known, dominant guitar, making it clear just how much the more kraut-inflected, synthetic side of the seventies is part of the group's DNA. "No Wow" leans hard on the electronics pedal, unleashing them in a lushly rock way, and expands VV's role, who sings almost the entire record, leaving Hotel to act as her bewitching and, if anything, even darker counterpart.

The atmosphere is extremely dark and claustrophobic, perpetually held back, always on the verge of exploding but never quite able to; it's this that stirs a pleasure that's continually frustrated in the listening, and thus ever-growing, as though we were always on the brink of orgasm but never able to reach it: excitement and heat keep rising while we're left helpless on the bed, drained of strength and satisfied by an act never consummated. It's no coincidence that Hince has named Suicide among his favourite bands, sharing with them the same destructuring approach to sound, stripping blues and rock down to the bone until they become ghosts of themselves – Ghost Rider(s), indeed.

The scent of imminent ending is palpable from the very start, in the title track that opens the record: a drum machine circling round in obsessive repetition, VV's vocals dancing insistently alongside Hotel's guitar, a deeply corporeal sound, made of flesh and guts (decomposing ones: "Who ain't dead yet/ fled to die closet to the shore"). "Love Is A Deserter" is a swaying ride through the ashes of every love gone wrong, and "Dead Road 7" is blues, real blues, steeped in the black horizon glimpsed from dead-end streets, Velvet-esque brothels with a vaguely gothic air that recall both Nick Cave's "Firstborn Is Dead" and Polly Jean's "Rid Of Me". "The Good Ones", already heavily rotated on MTV, is a perfect, flirtatious single, and by the end of its video you're left in no doubt that the sultry chemistry between the two (captured at very close range…) isn't purely professional — especially since, unlike Jack and Meg, neither of them has ever hidden the privileged, unbreakable bond that ties them together.

Hotel's slashing, cross-cutting guitar lines pour fuel on a fire already burning. "I Hate The Way You Love Pt. 1 and 2" (a reply to Cave's "Let Love In"?) strikes straight at the heart with its anti-romanticism, and if for most people love means life, here it seems to spring from the dark shadow hidden within man: "You bored me then and now you just bore me some more", Mosshart screams, full of rage, but the sudden shift in rhythm (which opens the second part) seems to stage a kind of evening farewell, brimming with promise.

The second side, perhaps not quite as intense as the first, still stands out for the paranoia of "Sweet Cloud", in which VV can't find the words to describe a massacre she herself has committed (the English word "fix" is beautifully chosen, pointing to language's inability to contain reality, which fits perfectly with the Kills' visceral, pre-linguistic music, beyond good and evil), while Hince carves out a lethal riff, numbed by electronic filtering. The unexpected country-tinged opening of "Rodeo Town", however baffling, breaks up the album's homogeneity and is a reminder of how much the band enjoys experimenting with disparate genres while still making them sound unmistakably their own (as Hotel himself stated in a recent interview).

The closing, gorgeous "Ticket Man" brings "No Wow" to a fitting close with faded atmospheres reminiscent of Cat Power's "You Are Free", such is the despair running through it; here, though, it's paired with a kind of self-satisfied resignation that has made the (terrible, sinful) shadow its own way of life.

An excellent confirmation, then, of a band that keeps its distance from most of today's music and forges a path that's entirely its own.

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30/04/2026