The Kills Fried My Little Brains 2003, Sanctuary Records $5.98 amazon.com *****

music review.
The Kills do blues right

By Lester Smiley
Northern Light

The Kills are a boy-girl combo who play blues-influenced rock in the new millennium, so needless to say, any comparison to the White Stripes will be tiresome and doomed to minimize the Kills’ accomplishments. However, the comparisons do lend themselves to new ways of illustrating the mediocrity of Detroit’s most photographed, candy-themed celebrities, so unfortunately they will have to persist.

There are a lot of groups out there that serve to expose the painfully irrelevant nature of the Stripes’ blues-pop, but the Kills are such an exceptional analogue to Jack and Meg that the contrast between the two really brings the shortcomings of the more popular band into focus.

The most fundamental difference is, of course, the guitar style. The blues is a rich fountain of ways of approaching the instrument, and any number of bands have been spawned by simply expanding one facet of a given bluesman’s style.

Jack White seems terminally fixated on the cleaner, more pyrotechnic late 1960s style of white blues. It lends itself to the conventional pop hook, and is palatable to the MTV Top 40 countdown masses who hear it and think, “I’m listening to guitars.”

The other side of the coin has its roots in the early blues, when the guitar was not some mystic God-tool, but more of a percussive instrument that could keep the beat and the melody at the same time. The oftentimes one-chord compositions of the Kills wouldn’t play that well in any popular radio format, but the open e-string drone produced is more powerful than any amount of gimmicky videos.

Drone guitar: it’s a good thing.

Another thing is, while the Stripes deal in a kind of disingenuous infantilism, the Kills’ songs are dark, gritty and the lyrics are basic and never overly clever. One of the major things wrong with newer mainstream blues is the tendency to dress up old arrangements and structures with modern ways of speech, and even more disgustingly, to anachronistically mention modern things like “e-mail” or “cell phones.” There’s no room in the blues for modern specificity, and the Kills realize this, keeping it simple, dark and oblique.

All this having been said, this latest single from the Kills’ album “Keep On Your Mean Side” showcases the duo’s most accessible side. The title track could easily be the background music for a Chevy Tahoe commercial if the chorus was anything other than “fried my little brains” repeated four times.

The B-side, “Jewel Thief” is also uncharacteristically poppy for the Kills; the acoustic strumming combined with drum machine sounds like a page ripped out of the Gorillaz’ playbook. Still, it’s a good example of where the blues could possibly go in the new millennium, and of a rocking band taking itself seriously.

For more information about the band and upcoming show dates, e-mail schmidtraymond@asdk12.org.