There's a cute little joke lurking in the background of Alfonso Cuarón's otherwise bleak dystopian thriller Children of Men. The film is set in the year 2027, and at one point a deejay overheard on a car radio introduces "a blast from the past all the way back to 2003," before spinning the Kills' country-blues serenade "Wait". Even if 2003 was only eight years ago, for the Kills, it might as well be 24, given how far Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince have been able to push the limited parameters of their guitar/drum-machine set-up and develop an identity increasingly distinct from their formative junior-Royal-Trux roots.
But even as the Kills have gone from covering Captain Beefheart on their debut 2002 EP, Black Rooster, to teaming up with Spank Rock producer XXXChange for 2008's electro-fied Midnight Boom, Mosshart and Hince have always conveyed a sense of anxiety and nervous energy through their music. And the duo's lusty performances eagerly play up the ambiguity of their platonic partnership. It's a quality that defines them as much as Mosshart's feverish moan, Hince's hand-slashing guitar riffs, and the synthetic beats-- just Google "the Kills + sexual tension." And even though the will-they/won't-they question has been definitively tilted toward the latter, that doesn't mean the Kills can't continue to summon that frisson through roleplay. But on Blood Pressures, there's a creeping sense that their individual preoccupations outside the band-- Mosshart as Jack White's feisty foil in the Dead Weather; Hince as the paparazzi-hounded fiancé of the world's most famous supermodel-- has diffused some of that intensity, as the duo attempts to evolve its dynamic.
Sonically, Blood Pressures retreats from Midnight Boom's dancefloor directives and energized, in-the-pocket pop. The new album feels at once a return to the Kills' beatbox-blues origins as well an attempt to broaden their palette with more sensitive, intimate turns. Notwithstanding the motorik garage-rock of "Heart Is a Beating Drum" and brash, big-beat stomp "Nail in My Coffin", this album will present Hince and Mosshart with fewer opportunities to stare each other down suggestively on stage in predatory, fuck-or-fight fashion. Whether it's the swampy reggae groove of "Satellite", the clock-punching blues-rock prowl "Damned if She Do", or the mid-album tandem of Hince's Lennon-esque reverie "Wild Charms" and Mosshart's slow-simmering answer track "DNA", there's an overarching sense of restraint and resignation that's disappointing in light of how fearless and adrenalized the band sounded on Midnight Boom.
On that album's standout moments (the desperation of "Last Day of Magic", the spiky outbursts of "Tape Song"), you could hear Mosshart really pushing herself to project a more passionate persona from behind the Kills' ultra-cool, cigarette-smoky pose. By contrast, Blood Pressures' would-be emotional centerpiece The Last Goodbye" is a maudlin piano ballad that feels oddly disaffected, with Mosshart singing in an overly poised, uncharacteristically lower register as if trying to channel some aging-diva caricature. A far better barometer of the Kills' maturation is the more understated but infinitely more affecting "Baby Says", a melancholic Mosshart/Hince duet set to a steady backbeat, ideal for filling in the awkward silences on a couples-retreat road trip gone bad. In other words, it's precisely the sort of interstate love song that the golden-oldies DJs of 2027 will be all over.
