Pages tagged “the kills”

Trace elements of Royal Trux + some Spank Rock mojo = bloodsugarsexmagic

Growing up on the playgrounds of Long Beach, Calif., there was a rhythmic game the girls used to play in a circle at recess called “Pizza Pizza Daddy-O.” The gist of the game was to mimic a complex series of hand/body claps and dance steps while simultaneously chanting along to a song that changed slightly every time it was sung:

Mary (or whatever the name du jour was) had a baby, (reply) Pizza pizza daddy-o
How do you know it? Pizza pizza daddy-o
’Cause she told me, Pizza pizza daddy-o
What’s his name? Pizza pizza daddy-o
Jesse James, Pizza pizza daddy-o
Let’s jerk it, Pizza pizza daddy-o
Let’s swim it, Pizza pizza daddy-o
Let’s skate it, Pizza pizza daddy-o
Let’s freak it, Pizza pizza daddy-o (add more improv, girls taking turns in the middle of the circle demonstrating the various dance steps, and you get the general idea).

As it happens, the California State University system commissioned an 18-minute black-and-white documentary back in the ’60s that captures on film not only this game but countless others played by black girls on a playground somewhere in Los Angeles. The film is called—wait for it—Pizza Pizza Daddy-O. This same film somehow found its way into the consciousness of The Kills’ British guitar-slinger Jamie “Hotel” Hince and his devastatingly destroyed-looking vocal sidekick, American expat Alison “VV” Mosshart, who were so inspired by the film’s “Hey, Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind” cheer template that they applied it to the songs on their third album.

What’s slightly weird—and wonderful—about this development is that The Kills are, first and foremost, a garage-rock act in the classic boy/girl mold. By now you’ve read the memo: Central Casting finds a pair of misfit art-school types, maroons them somewhere by a random twist of fate and/or airline schedules, they pledge allegiance to one another artistically if not sexually (the better to tease you with the tension, especially if they ridiculously pretend to be brother and sister), and the resulting lo-fi maelstrom finds its way into the hearts/minds of outsiders the world over. Add suitably stripped-down color scheme; lather, rinse, repeat.

So for those of you who’ve found yourselves enamored of the sneering, sexy snarl The Kills so expertly whipped up on their first two albums, fear not—you’ll still discover plenty of your beloved scuzz-rock blues all over this NEW one. It’s just that, on Midnight Boom, it’s now served over a bed of bouncing beats born of the hardscrabble playgrounds of Inner City U.S.A. (which, as Marvin Gaye once sang, makes me wanna holler). VV can still channel Patti Smith—or even more accurately, Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema—like a champ, tossing off damaging one-liners with delicious callousness (“It’s alright to be mean—I want expensive sadness”; “Time ain’t gonna cure you honey / Time don’t give a shit”) while playing Bonnie to Hotel’s Clyde with just the right degree of insolence. For his part, Hotel hasn’t altered his angular playing style, plunging plenty of cut-glass shards into the heart of the album’s best songs—the fiercely rocking “Hook and Line”; the dissonant and disturbing “M.E.X.I.C.O.C.U.,” a travelogue of sorts about the pair’s misguided attempt to escape the rigors of recording by heading south of the border during hurricane season— but taking pains to ensure they slide neatly into the album’s more rhythmic context, provided by Spank Rock producer Alex “Armani XXXchange” Epton. Imagine an electro remix of “Sweet Jane,” and you’re more than halfway there.

In less talented hands, the dozen songs on this record easily could have sounded like a failed, high-concept art thesis, and to be perfectly objective, not every track really kills (“Alphabet Pony” features perhaps the band’s 100th use of the word “pony” in song—time to grab a thesaurus, kids). But the album’s final two tracks—the slinky Velvets-with-a-beatbox “What New York Used to Be” and the bewitching Mazzy Stones country-blues ballad “Goodnight Bad Morning”—demonstrate that true artisans don’t necessarily need more tools in their box to make magic. Whether cutting a dance track or cutting a diamond, the great ones just need enough time to carve deep enough to let the light come streaming from the dark heart of the rock.

Although phone-key bleeps and dialtone samples drive the beat from the first track on The Kills’ upcoming album Midnight Boom, the London duo recently told Billboard they’ll be damned before anyone pays $2.99 to hear snippets of it emanating from their cells. “I hate the ringtone thing; I think its destroying music,” Jamie Hince specified. Oh well, T-Pain it is then!

Produced by Alex Epton/Armani XXXchange, the new record is due out March 18 on Domino and is supposedly the result of Hince and co-member Allison Mosshart shooting for “modern playground songs” with “upbeat melodies and dark lyrics.” Perhaps there will be a secret track re-interpretation of “The Ballad of Ms. Mary Mack” that explores in depth her penchant for dark attire and tendency toward elephantine hallucination.

In another interview, Mosshart explained that the album’s title refers to “the evening, from midnight to 6 a.m. That’s the glory time of creativity and secrecy.”

Midnight Boom track list:
"U.R.A Fever"
"Cheap and Cheerful"
"Tape Song"
"Getting Down"
"Last Day of Magic"
"Hook and Line"
"Black Balloon"
"M.E.X.I.C.O.C.U."
"Sour Cherry"
"Alphabet Pony"
"What New York Used"
"Goodnight Bad"

Related links:
TheKills.TV
The Kills on MySpace
YouTube: The Kills - "U.R.A. Fever"

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

A mixing console is an unlikely subject for an urban legend, but Jamie Hince—aka Hotel, the six-string-slinging half of U.K. blues-punk duo The Kills—was intrigued enough to spend a month in the American Midwest in its presence.

While producing another outfit in France, the admittedly obsessive musician caught wind of a mysterious Flickinger mixing desk, one of only three manufactured in the late ’60s, this one personally tailored for Sly Stone himself. As the mythology went, recalls Hince, “Sly had wanted it to levitate in his house, and he had it all black-lighted so he could see his cocaine on the top of the board. And when the guys came to fit it into his studio, he had armed guards that held them at gunpoint and basically kidnapped these guys for a week and said ‘You’re not leaving this house until you fix this console up and show me how to work it.’ Then he piled a bunch of coke on the desk and actually kept these guys there at gunpoint. So there were all these ghostly stories about this desk, but,” Hince pužs up proudly beneath his black leather jacket, “I managed to locate it, the actual desk that all these stories came from. And it was in Benton Harbor, Michigan.”

Naturally, Hince hopped the next jet to Chicago with his partner Alison “VV” Mosshart in tow, and drove deep into the Midwest night to their mixing-board destination. A couple kids had somehow gotten hold of the Flickinger and installed it in a warehouse studio. “And the story continues,” adds Hotel with a creepy shudder. “Because these kids phoned up the guy that had originally fitted it into Sly Stone’s studio, called him a dozen times but he’d just hang up every time, until finally he said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with that desk. I don’t wanna remember that time in my life—at all!’ So we were just desperate to use it.” Which they promptly did for the writing/demo sessions for No Wow, the bare-knuckled followup to their primal-blues Rough Trade debut, Keep On Your Mean Side. And they made themselves at home, he says, “in that poor tragedy of a town. We stayed at the studio, and it took us three days to get onto our Kills schedule, which was waking up at dusk and going to bed at dawn. So we just wrote and wrote and wrote, just kept going, really.”

“We knew we were going to nowhere,” adds the Florida-bred, now-London-based VV, who plays most Kills gigs standing sideways at the mic, facing Hotel with her long brown bangs obscuring her face. “We knew there’d probably be no inspiring art or writing available to us, so we brought our typewriters, journals, notebooks, and art and poetry books—stuž from home to build our little camp in the wilderness, and then lock the door and not leave for a month.” Several new Kills cuts, like the fuzz-guitar-heavy “The Good Ones” and the handclap-rhythmed “At The Back Of The Shell,” were inspired by tiny Benton Harbor and its curious weekend nightspot—the Myers supermarket, where local singles regularly hook up.

VV and Hotel quickly high-tailed it to record Now Wow in New York. But was the fabled Flickinger everything Hince imagined? He scratches his chin, thoughtfully. “Well, when there’s something that you’ve imagined, and there are all these legends surrounding it, it kinda grows in size in your mind,” he finally decides. “But when I finally saw the console, my first reaction was … ‘It’s really small!’ Because I’d built it up into this huge … thing with all this history around it. So yes, it was a physically small desk. But it sounded absolutely amazing.”