The turn-of-century New Rock City hype—which hinged on
the sudden restoration of New York cool and the above-ground anointing
of garage rock—made the world safe for guitar bands again. So the
current official rockist story goes: The cultural moment crested by the
Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—crucially cued across the
Atlantic by the UK music press sniffing around these “The”
bands—begat the Kills, who are, after bubbling under for several
seasons, now enjoying a place in the sun on the strength of their
fusion of garage, glam, lo-fi, noise, and dance. With the recent
release of the duo’s rather ballyhooed third album, Midnight
Boom—which, interestingly, features a cut titled “What New
York Used to Be”—there has been yet another round of triumphal
trumpeting about the “return of rock” from the Kills’ critics and
consumers alike.
Being long alienated from the indie realm and, despite my work,
virtually impervious to the unctuous hype the UK music press traffics
in, my introduction to this Anglo-American duo came via the style
arena, not the sonic one. For the past year-and-a-half or more, fashion
magazines—from Vogue to the edgier inheritors of former UK
style bible The Face—have circled like vultures around the
Kills’ Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince, citing their performances at
European catwalk shows, their relatively monochromatic throwback
hipster look, and—particularly at present—their fortuitous
romantic entanglements with broken London power couple Kate Moss and
Jefferson Hack.
So it was with trepidation that I accepted the post-SXSW
recommendation of a friend’s colleague who raved about the Kills and
played up their purported resemblance to my most beloved Royal Trux.
Midnight Boom only displays fleeting, superficial linkage to
that dear departed pair amidst the shouts of opener “U.R.A. Fever.”
While tension reified by fan prurience may sustain the Kills, neither
player rivals the Trux couple’s individuality or experimental rigor.
However, Hince and Mosshart do have similar relationships to black
culture, doubtless shored up by her tangled Gulf Coast roots and his
coming-of-age amongst a renaissance of British Invasion hegemony.
Race tends to be ignored in the above-cited official story of
garage rock’s early 21st century pop dominance. Ironically many of this
movement’s icons and satellites—TV on the Radio, Bloc Party, the
YYY’s Karen O, and defectors Kimya Dawson and Devendra
Banhart—have denied, or side-stepped, their races in the indie
buttermilk, even as scene king Jack White and his hallowed duo the
White Stripes have dealt in hyper-whiteness. In titling their disc
Midnight Boom, a reference to Jack Kerouac’s The
Subterraneans, the Kills make plain their allegiance to
African-centered cool, following the Beats’ reliance on jazz as
soundtrack to Nubian intellectual shadowboxing.
Then there’s the Jack White-ish formalism applied to the project,
recorded both at London’s Toe Rag Studios—where only pre-’67
analogue gear is employed—and in (roughly) 93% black,
riot-blighted Benton Harbor, Michigan, using Sly Stone’s former mixing
desk for sonic purity. Midnight Boom‘s repetitive, chant-like
tracks incorporate call-and-response elements and are tethered to
menacing guitar swirl and white negro hipster ‘tude. This does not
obscure the African origins of the music. It’s just interesting that
the fashioning of modernism in the twenty-first century is still so
reliant on such an ol’ skool one-way transference of power.