No Wow
(2005/King Records)
The Kills' sound was always going to be as sparse as it was easily recognisable, built from the basic components of husky garage blues vocals, a single guitar, and a drum machine. Here the sound is honed further down towards its bare bones with the drum machine spitting out its punk-disco beats like a kind of hung-over Fisher Price Kraftwerk, and voodoo menace seeps from every pore.

Sure it all sounds the same, but The Kills make a virtue of everything sounding to same. And listen to it again. And again. What's your favourite track? Listen again. Still got the same favourite? There's a lot of subtlety at work among these songs, with the slightly more immediate tracks like "I Hate The Way You Love" and "Love Is A Deserter" offering the closest thing to instant thrills but a track like "At The Back Of The Shell" revealing itself despite the odd arrangement as being melodically stronger, and the country-noir of "Rodeo Town" offering an eerie tale of small town passion that sticks in your head despite your better judgement telling you that it's just "Black Velvet" by Alannah Myles restyled for indie kids.

The Kills aren't quite perfect. For a start there's too much pretentiousness and melodrama in the way their lyrics linger on images of murder and evil, and you wonder how much better they would be if the undercurrent of sex and nihilism that runs beneath the surface of all these songs was expressed with more maturity and realism and less style-consciousness. Nevertheless, this is only their second album and there's plenty of time for things to get a whole lot better. Enjoy. -Ian Martin, Feb.22.05.