With the release of their first four, critically applauded albums Keep On Your Mean Side, No Wow, Midnight Boom and Blood Pressures, indie rock duo The Kills have dominated the blogosphere for some time for a sound that’s been a departure from their previous projects — a scuzzy, lo-fi power chord and garage rock-based rock ‘n’ roll sound that’s been compared favorably to the likes of The White Stripes, The Black Keys and others — although strangely despite the fact that the duo have publicly cited Captain Beefheart, PJ Harvey, LCD Soundsystem, The Velvet Underground, The Fall, Patti Smith, Suicide and Royal Trux as influences on their sound and aesthetic.
Ash and Ice, the duo’s latest full-length effort and first full-length effort in over 5 years was released last week — and if you’ve been frequenting this site you’d know that I wrote about the album’s first single “Heart Of A Dog” earlier this year. Sonically, Ash and Ice‘s first single proved to be a thorough refinement of their sound as the duo paired enormous boom-bap drum programming, skittering beats, buzzing electronics, scorching guitar chords and anthemic hook with Mossheart’s bluesy, cigarettes and whiskey soaked vocals to crate a swaggering and arena rock-friendly song that clearly draws from Delta blues but possesses a raw, insistent and urgent carnality. The album’s latest single “Siberian Nights” continues along a similar vein of the preceding single — boom bap beats, propulsive drumming, bluesy guitar chords, a sinuous bass line and subtly ominous electronics in a sleek, sensual song that shimmies and struts about with a cool self-assuredness.
The recently released music video is a stark and gorgeously surreal video that possesses a nightmarish logic; certainly as a photographer, there are sequences I absolutely envy — a scene of a horse running in slow motion and you can see every sinew and fiber flexing in unified movement; a barking husky in surreal slow motion with teeth snarled angrily and so on. In some way, the video evokes a lingering and inescapable fucked up dystopian nightmare.
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