:: Record Review

The Kills

Midnight Boom
(Domino; 2008)

Rating: 75%
Combined Rating: 76%

It’s definitely intriguing to suddenly see so much attention focused on the Kills when a lot of their appeal, I think, lies in how their records seem to take an inward bent to foil and tense out a lot of the extravagance we’ve come to expect of “garage rock” or “sleaze pop” or whatever. Their music isn’t mysterious, is what I mean. It seems to grow out of its own forwardness, just as it seems about ready to go all heavy-lid and call it an early night.

Midnight Boom isn’t a new kind of pop album, but it’s pop nonetheless. Its songs deal in hooks, and its currency is cheap cruelty, glib and commandeering, and dolled out with just enough chutzpah to make it come off as sort of cheerful. Tracks like “Sour Cherry” and “Getting Down” funk too obviously to ever actually take an open interest in the cross-genre carnival they keep hinting at. These are songs as self-conscious correspondence and their resonance is mostly one-sided. For all the expansive ideas and fresh production tricks that Spank Rock’s Alex Epton brings to the table, Midnight Boom is still built on dialogue, or like what two people can do with Kate Moss and a really snazzy guitar. The album simmers throughout with that kind of self-regard. Its narcissism is what ultimately makes it magnetic.

And it’s sort of fortunate, really, that “Hotel” and “VV” aren’t exceptionally talented or original: for the most part they’re almost like session players in their own songs. The attitude and confidence is pure front, and maybe not just a bit incidental on the fact that it isn’t very hard to act the bad-ass pop star if what you’re writing is not-to-be-fucked-with music in the first place. None of this material ever offers enough leverage to be slaughtered or ship-wrecked in a way we might call “convincing”—which, it turns out, isn’t a problem at all, considering how every track here treats the middle ground as a sort of comedy of confidences. The chest-out heave-ho of “URA Fever” is probably the best example of how to make a mediocre conceit persuasive enough to verge on the religious. Its sledgehammer guitar and cock-eyed rhythm takes center-court and springs the undertow of arrogance that would sink less astute acts. Its braggadocio would be annoying if it wasn’t for the fact that its heartless shallowness is played as something human and direct. What’s alien and slithery becomes familiar and human and it’s in that precipice between what’s imitation and what’s ideal where the Kills may have found their ultimate niche. They may have finally become transgressive.

You get the feeling, anyway, that this Hince dude knows he isn’t that hot on guitar and is probably acutely aware of the limited places he and Mosshart can go if they’re both content enough to just sniff around each other’s mirrors. Which is, give or take, what they’ve been doing since Keep on Your Mean Side (2003) and Midnight Boom certainly doesn’t offer any dramatic evolutionary lurch from this core formula. What they do for the first time, though, is lose much of the minimalism that had dictated their more “hip” material. Because this record is one defined by its limits, sure—the songs are short, super-catchy and do strike one as similar—but they’re also thorough and (most importantly) never dull. “Last Day of Magic” and “Hook and Line” carom through their interesting hooks like nobody’s business, and the bits in “Black Balloon” where the bass follows through all-too-obviously on Mosshart’s lines is a total blast. Of course it’s repetitive and obvious and a bit generic. But it’s the instant gratification—the sheer consistency of fun—that makes Midnight Boom so irresistible to begin with. It is what it is, basically. This is it.