The Kills: Blood Pressures

(Domino)

More well known these days for their dalliances with Jack White (musical) and Kate Moss (marital), Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince make a long-awaited return to The Kills after a three-year break. Throughout Blood Pressures there are frequent nods to the stripped down, art rock that made them so compelling early on in their career — the gutsy ‘Damned If You Do’, for example, the sultry swagger of ‘Future Starts Slow’ and the distorted dark riffs of ‘You Don’t Own The Road’. But it’s when they combine their trademark bluesy attack with a newfound approach to heavy sonic layering that The Kills’ fourth offering really comes into its own. ‘Satellite’ – all drilling guitars, monstrous bass and haunting, soulful harmonies – is one of the best songs they’ve ever penned, as is ‘DNA’, with its slow-building creepy tension, but ‘Last Goodbye’ is perhaps the biggest surprise of all – Mosshart leading a sorrow-filled, string-tinged waltz. ‘It’s the last goodbye, I swear,’ she laments. ‘I can’t survive on a half-hearted love that will never be whole’. Genuinely stirring stuff.