The Kills are suffering from an unfortunate and unwarranted identity crisis. First of all, their name: no, they are not The Thrills, nor are they The Killers. Next comes the composition of their group: they are a male-female rock duo.
\Oh, you mean the White Stripes?"" you might be thinking. No, they are not the White Stripes, even though, like their compositional siblings, The Kills create lo-fi, minimalist garage rock. Trying to differentiate indie rock bands is starting to become as difficult as telling one frat boy from the next (""The one with the popped collar and gelled-up hair.""-""But they all have popped collars and gelled-up hair..."").
It is tempting to just write The Kills off as a poor man's White Stripes until one actually listens to No Wow. Though their name is virtually undifferentiable, and they operate within a bloated and overexposed genre, The Kills nevertheless manage to create a surprisingly unique sound.
The first thing that sets them apart is the fact that in the place of a real flesh and blood (and for most rock bands drug-addled) drummer they use merely a drum machine. This swap has an immediate impact on the dynamic of their sound, and it is not like Ben Gibbard swapping Death Cab for the plethora of Dentel's electronics. Rather, in the increasingly minimalist world of neo-garage rock the absence of crashing cymbals or pounding bass gives The Kills a very interesting dynamic.
Instead of swooning from charged chorus to towering guitar solo to raucous drum fill, each of the 11 tracks on No Wow carve out a narrow range to fill with their subdued blues rock intensity. Think Wilco's ""Spiders (Kidsmoke)"" only without the meandering Tweedy solos. With the drum machine competently keeping the beat in the background, the guitar stands in as the driving rhythmic force. The Kills' guitars crunch and crack through a steady driving beat, propelling the music forward but never for a second wandering out of their narrow range. On ""At the Back of the Shell"" the guitar keeps a beat just as steady as the infectious hand claps, as if the two were playing variations on a theme.
While each song is a marvel of restrained blues rock, it is this very constraint that makes each song seem unsettlingly familiar to the next. In this sense, The Kills' only misstep is falling in to the ""if it ain't broke, don't fix it"" mentality. The formula applied to each song works surprisingly well, but the fact that each follows the same bare-bones structure gives No Wow a feeling of tedium at times. It is not that the songs are repetitive, only The Kills have taken minimalism to such an extreme that they have almost painted themselves into a corner, albeit a corner that rocks in an amazingly unconventional way.
