Album Review: The Kills, "Blood Pressures"

Best get it out of the way: Jamie Hince, the guitar-toting half of this male-female duo (shades of WHITE STRIPES) is getting hitched to supermodel Kate Moss.

Now, onto the more important stuff: This is THE KILLS' fourth album. In that time a lot of the musical detritus has fallen away, allowing Hince and singer Alison Mosshart to focus on their musical strengths as evinced by this much stronger effort. Not the most technically proficient stringsman, Hince nevertheless has a potent feel for grit, texture, and tone.

On Blood Pressures he lays down dirty, lo-fi riffs and squalls that complement Mosshart's sharp and sassy singing, especially on Heart Is A Beating Drum and album standout DNA, where Mosshart soars over Hince’s growling stoicism. The shimmering, out-of-phase guitar on Baby Says manages to evoke the vibe of Stones' classic Gimme Shelter, while You Don’t Own The Road has the kind of riff that must have been reclaimed from a fuzzpile carpet in a dirty motel somewhere in the early 70s.

Colin Liddell
Metropolis
11th April, 2011

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!