An Album a Day is posted 5 days a week, Monday- Friday
Going back to the collection of albums that Noah really likes, we’re today looking at the latest album by The Kills, Ash & Ice. For those of you who are unfamiliar with The Kills, they are a blues inspired indie rock duo featuring Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince. Rather than The White Stripes / Black Keys formula of drums and guitar they instead have only guitar and vocals, using a drum machine to fill out the rhythm section. The interplay of Mosshart’s vocals and Hince’s guitar playing is what makes this band a lot more than the sum of their parts.
While The White Stripes always had a punk influence they never really played up the bad boy punk image all that much. Their music was devoid of profanity and generally were closer to nasty blues rock than anything. While The Kills don’t sound particularly punk rock, being way too slow and methodical, they do play up the menacing atmosphere and delinquent attitude of punk music. The image and attitude of punk without the sound is probably why they’re usually categorized as indie rockers. This slightly darker tone and image also bleeds over into the Jack White and Alison Mosshart supergroup The Dead Weather.
Getting back to Ash & Ice, it may be their easiest album to listen too, especially if you come from a pop or mainstream rock background. Blood Pressures and No Wow are also pretty accessible, but this is the most streamlined and cleanly produced album they have ever done. The whole album is fantastic from start to finish, but the highlights are Doing It To Death, Hum For Your Buzz and Siberian Nights.
Doing It To Death was the first single off of this album and it’s not hard to see why, this song has the crossover appeal to have worked on alternative stations, rock stations and maybe even pop stations. The way that Hince’s guitar builds and fades in time with the drum machine creates the perfect bed for Mosshart’s vocal delivery. Also props to the music video director for having the choreography evoke the feeling of the song perfectly.
Hum For Your Buzz is one of my favorite moments on this album, containing nothing but Mosshart singing over a very basic blues guitar accompaniment. Obviously this is one of the softer moments on the record and features some of the best of Mosshart and Hince playing off of each other. I also want to hear more direct guitar solos after the tasteful blues solo Hince pulls off here.
Lastly we have Siberian Nights, the track which absolutely drips in the sexual tension and energy that Mosshart is so good at conveying. While she always has an element of this in her delivery, this song makes it fairly explicit with lyrics full of double entendre and sexual references. The lyrics seem to go back and forth between seduction and hesitation, with Mosshart asking in the chorus why the target of her affection has no love for her. By the end of the song she turns from seduction to practically begging her target to help her through the Siberian Nights.
While this album isn’t anything particularly special in regards to the rest of The Kills catalogue, it’s one of their only albums I can get all the way through. Most of their albums feature a dud or two, or have weird noise rock inspired breaks, but this one is clean all the way through. As a huge Dead Weather fan it’s cool to see how Alison manages to take over and own every track she’s on, regardless of what sort of band she’s working with.
Album on ITunes
Album on Amazon
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