I first heard The Kills on the day that Waylon Jennings died and, despite a crushing bleakness that enveloped me like a giant pair of shit-stained undies, they made me feel a little better about life. Later that day I told a female acquaintance (someone who'd had the misfortune of being educated in Northeastern private schools and naturally had no idea of who Waylon Jennings was) about Waylon and she thought I meant Peter Jennings, the newscaster. "Oh noooo," she said slowly, cupping her hand to her mouth, "Not Peee-ter. He was soooo great." We were at a barbecue eating shish kabobs, and I credit The Kills with preventing me from plunging my metal poker straight through that girl's black heart.
One-half of The Kills is Alison "VV" Mosshart, a Floridian who, along with Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, may eventually rehabilitate the sullied name of that near-forgotten state. She sings like Joan Jett, though initially, you might recall Happy Days' Pinky Tuscadero, whose coquettish growl stood in poetic juxtaposition to the leather body suit, kerchief and biker gloves that she sashayed in onstage. Remember the episode where Pinky battles the Malachi brothers in a demolition derby and gets righteously mangled? When the Fonz lifts her limp body from the wreckage he has this implacable look in his eyes-- a look he wore only once before, if memory serves me correctly, when Al's restaurant burned down-- and you just know some beatdowns are imminent. Man! That still gives me goose bumps. The point being, VV puts the melodrama to good use. Her voice has a frenetic, indignant quality much like Karen O's, and it's the foundation of four out of the five songs on their freshly reissued Black Rooster EP.
The other half of The Kills is Londoner Jamie "Hotel" Hince. Aside from having the coolest nickname on the other side of the Big Drink, Hotel plays a furious, unwieldy guitar that provides the perfect accompaniment to VV's vengeance-minded crooning. Their transatlantic collaboration has a peculiar resonance on the song "Cat Claw", which sounds something like if The Stooges cut a single with Boss Hog. The drumming is relentless but understated, and the lyrics (some of which are inscrutable) are violently lustful: "Never know who comes it might easily be me/ You don't give a fuck for my love 'cause that's too much." On the title track, Hotel and VV trade come-ons in a call-and-response chorus: "You wanna fuck and fight?/ In the basement/ The kid gotta rattlesnake gun/ In the basement." Both songs bring to mind a softcore version of Backyard Wrestling with Sean Connery versus he-woman Jennifer Capriati.
The Kills have earned comparisons to Captain Beefheart (which is sorta fucked), but they owe more of a debt to Sonic Youth and Royal Trux-- though Black Rooster is neither as self-indulgent or drug-obsessed as Herrema and Hagerty in their prime. Aside from the last track, an experimental throwaway titled "Gum", the songs on this EP make for an extraordinary debut.
