The Kills

May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy

RAW POWER
With children's songs and R&B as a guide, The Kills go digital with a vengeance

As any punk rocker will attest, screw the gear and technology — the only thing that really matters is the music. In essence, that's still the basic credo of singer Alison Mosshart and guitarist Jamie Hince, whose stripped-down, scuzz-rock sound as The Kills has drawn comparisons to everyone from the Velvet Underground to the White Stripes. But as Hince describes it, the duo's latest outing, Midnight Boom (Domino, 2008), came to life by taking on a few new production challenges.

“I'd just got really bored with modern rock guitar and rock production,” he explains. “Our old records were produced in this very retro, analog way because I like the warmth of that sound. But on this record, I felt like it was time to make something that was a bit more forward-thinking. I was getting more fascinated by R&B production and by the way the low end works when it gets really crunchy. We decided we were gonna embrace all this new technology, so it was the first time we recorded onto a computer.”

The move was prompted in part by Hince and Mosshart's agreement not to listen to any outside music when they began work on the new album in early 2006. Restless for new ideas, Hince found a short film online called Pizza Pizza Daddy-O, a 1968 documentary by Bess Lomax Hawes chronicling the playground chants sung by children at a Los Angeles school.

“It sparked off loads of thoughts,” Hince says. “It struck me that the same ingredients in these children's songs were in ours — a simple backbeat with these quiet nursery-rhyme melodies and really twisted lyrics about depression and alcoholism and domestic violence. It just seemed like a weird crossroads. You could see it had come from lullabies and nursery rhymes and the blues, but you could also see where it was headed. There are bits of ESG [Emerald, Sapphire & Gold] and Salt-N-Pepa in there, which is amazing.”

Hince picked up an Akai MPC60 — not exactly the latest in beat-crafting gear, but more than enough to get to work. He started fleshing out some of the 40-odd songs that he and Mosshart had written over the course of about 18 months, and soon the album began to take shape. Tracking on Pro Tools and armed with his Höfner Galaxy guitar, a pair of Electro-Harmonix POG (Polyphonic Octave Generator) pedals, a Boss delay and a vintage (circa 1939) Gibson combo amp, Hince added slippery, synthlike guitar sounds to the MPC's grit-encrusted beats. With Mosshart soaring over the top on such gems as the hectically catchy “Last Day of Magic” and the school-yard taunt, “Alphabet Pony” — and by contrast, crooning velvety on the closing ballad, “Goodnight Bad Morning” — the two knew they had something different.

“We recorded vocals pretty hot into Pro Tools,” Hince says, citing the Neumann U 49 that Mosshart has used on past albums. “But also I think Alison started singing quite differently. She was opening up her voice and pushing it much more. I love the way that on tape, when vocals get distorted, it's really sympathetic, but when you record to digital, even when it's distorting, it's really superclear. So we made quite a lot out of that.”

For some extra bite on the beats, the band turned to Spank Rock producer Alex Epton (aka Armani XXXChange), who came in to mix the hypnotic clap-based song “Black Balloon,” the thrash workout “M.E.X.I.C.O.C.U.” and several other cuts, often using the Pro Tools SoundReplacer plug-in to beef up individual drum hits. But even with the extra hand in the mixing phase (the band also made use of a Neve Melbourne desk, as well as a Flickinger console originally built for Sly Stone and now housed in a studio in Benton Harbor, Mich.), the raw dynamics of the original tracks were essentially left intact.

“It's funny, because when I'm in the studio I can only concentrate on that technical stuff over a short period of time,” Hince says. “I'm not really from that background — I'm not really a gearhead or anything like that. I'll just use whatever sounds good to me, and it's almost like the less things I have around me, the better it is in the end. I'm always trying to triumph with ideas more than anything else.”

Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus

Want to use this article? Click here for options!