The Kills: Rising Blood Pressures

One of the least commercially successful bands to ever become stars, The Kills find themselves in an odd position with Blood Pressures. To an extent, Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart are known as individuals, not as a team: Alison wooed into fronting Jack White’s nonsensical art-blues folly Dead Weather, Jamie courting Kate Moss, a supermodel who could have any rocker she wanted but chose this grizzled warhorse. These excursions apart helped the Kills’ simmering career reach something of a boiling point after the 2008 release of Midnight Boom, so the timing is right for an album that pops with color and style. That’s not Blood Pressures. It’s coiled and roiling, tension twitching just below its surface, a mood album for smog-smeared nicotine nights. The Kills have always had a knack for walking the knife’s edge, grinding more kineticism out of a drum loop than any other rock band, the precision of the rhythms ratcheting up the nerves, but the duo’s increasing instrumental finesse only increases the moody anxiety. Like Midnight Boom, a record which fairly exploded with enveloping energy, Blood Pressures benefits from a distinct sense of purpose but the Kills have drained out the color, painting everything on a grey scale that’s less immediately thrilling but is surely enthralling. Proceeding at a slow, steady crawl—the hardest rockers aren’t necessarily frenzied, they just hit with a brutal efficiency—it’s an album for when the nights hours start to fade away, where the evening never began and it will never end, its horizon always hazy and just out of reach.