It’s inevitable that people are going to speculate on whether or not this US-UK boy-girl duo have deliberately constructed their fashionably lo-fi ‘anti-music’ attitude; afterall, the cover art for the band’s first ‘Black Rooster EP, featured Mosshart and Hince arsing around in a photo-booth with the pouts the size of balloons, doing their best to look cool and undaunted. It was the war cry of someone reluctant to get out of bed in the morning – not revolutionary exactly, more stroppy. Towers weren’t likely to be toppled, and walls weren’t likely to be torn down, but it was evident from the pair’s reluctance to wash or allocate any of their advance to professional photography that they were unlikely to compromise. And little has changed. The cover for new album, ‘Midnight Boom’ features the couple crashed out on a bed with all manner of crap spread out on the duvet: Polaroids, a pack of playing cards, a pair of nail scissors, a few coffee mugs and an edition of Hubert Selby Jnr’s novel, ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’. Yes, a statement of intent, but it’s the last detail that is probably the clearest indication of where the record is heading. The novel, a salacious and unorthodox brew of coarse and casual language, ignoring most of the conventional rules of grammar, became something of a cult classic in the mid-Sixties, owing to Selby Jnr’s uncompromising look at violence, homosexuality, gang rape, travestism and domestic violence – an approach more than adequately reproduced on ‘Midnight Boom’ recorded not amongst the heaving, madding crowd of downtown Los Angeles as first anticipated but in the relative quietude of Benton Harbor, Michigan with Spank Rock producer Alex Epton (aka Armani XXXchange). The band’s intention was to produce ‘modern playground songs,’ with really upbeat melodies and dark lyrics, ‘like kids used to sing during recess’, and given Alison ‘VV’ Mosshart’s icily understated vocals curling like death-garlands around the brutally existential, ‘Cheap and Cheerful’, ‘Black Balloon’ and ‘Alphabet Pony’ it’s fair to say they’ve nailed it. Sparse, minimal but rattling with no end of electronic rag and bone, muffled distortion, scratchy guitars and grumbling synthesizers, tracks like ‘What New York Used To Be’ and ‘Cheap and Cheerful’ come somewhere between PJ Harvey, Miss Kittin and LCD Soundsystem. It’s not garage, it’s not blues and its saucily gothic subtexts means it’s certainly not pop. The band even achieve their own ‘Sunday Morning’ moment with the blissfully unassuming ‘Goodnight Bad Morning’, a track that amounts to little more than a gentle, revolving guitar lick and a couple of one finger piano strikes but carries the record’s greatest musical weight.
Look out, the world’s behind you.
‘MIDNIGHT BOOM’ – OUT 18.03.08