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The Kills make a lot out of a little

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 01, 2012|By Franklin Soults

Involving other people has always been quite complicating and confusing,… (shawn brackbill )

For 10 years, the Kills have made the most out of the fewest components necessary for rock ’n’ roll - meaning, in the Kills’ case, a vocalist, a guitarist, and an attitude.

The duo formed in London after a chance hotel encounter between a multitalented Englishman in his early 30s with a knack for nasty, blues-rock riffs, and a decade-younger American woman who could wail to match. On the duo’s striking 2002 debut EP, “Black Rooster,’’ the sound barely added up to a one-person-band, with a drum machine completing the package.

Compared to the Black Keys and the White Stripes, two other duos making cultural wavelets back then, the Kills were even more minimalist and less rooted in tradition, like transatlantic rovers with a mechanized beat. Certainly they had the rootless rovers’ attitude down pat, romanticizing decadence and recklessness in keeping with the long rock ’n’ roll tradition that stretches from Nick Cave, to the Rolling Stones, to the image surrounding Jerry Lee Lewis, the original Killer.

In art, as in life, this deviant stance is often an obsessive dead-end, to say the least. But as the years inevitably passed, guitarist Jamie Hince and singer Alison Mosshart broadened their stance without negating its musical and emotional edginess.

In April last year, the duo released “Blood Pressures,’’ an album that at one point features a gospel choir, at another allows a tender cabaret ballad, and everywhere looks back at their walk on the wild side from a veteran’s vantage. Even so, “Blood Pressures’’ isn’t detached from that wild side - it can rock as nastily as ever - nor have the duo abandoned the singularity of their partnership. Tonight, a week before a tour-culminating 10th anniversary show in New York City, Hince and Mosshart will demonstrate that they can still do it all, alone together at the sold-out Royale.

“We both thought it was going to be really difficult live,’’ Mosshart says in a telephone interview, speaking about the new album. “I was like, ‘Well, Jamie, I can play keyboard or I can play a drum, or I can just run around stage and do nine things at once.’ We rehearsed the record for like a week, and it was, like, in two days, I think, we’d figured it all out.’’

It begs the question: Why not make the work easier by adding others to the band? But that underestimates the artistic heat of Mosshart and Hince’s partnership, a glow so hot and exclusive that it has often been mistaken for romantic ardor.