Cheap and Cheerless
This song is a guilty pleasure for me. Guilty because The Kills are the Marquis de Sade’s of skeletal alleyway rock wreckage, artists whose image has always felt a little too arch, constructed and Warholian for me. A lyric like “I want expensive sadness”, regardless of the labored New York aesthetic is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect Paris Hilton to say. Nihilism and empty heiress blather tend to meet on the extreme ends of the circle. But there’s something about the gutter blitheness that makes The Kills a band that gets you in touch with your dirtiest, darkest most decadent impulses even if it is a hand-crafted collection of ironically non-ironic cliches. Not to mention, they can concoct grooves that sound assembled from tenement litter with guitar little more that sparse, fierce punches. I like them, but always fell like I should have my caveats handy.
Imagine my surprise to see that the video for a song celebrating the destructive, melodramatic and snide aspects of human nature that has almost no creative energy behind its images. We have tattered drum corps that really just looking like a methadone line forced to play band camp for day. Splashes of paint smear the screen but the effect is campy, psychedelic, the antithesis of their sound. If this is itself a cheeky inversion of their image, then I’m afraid I have to give up out of the sheer exhaustion of following such Olympic level posturing. Allison Mosshart forgoes her pitch black mane for Flo’s wig from Alice making a perfunctory stab at the retro junky look that serves the video only in the sense of adding another decade to the slopped pastiche. This song sounds sexy and dangerous, but the video is simply lazy, limp and tame. They may as well have done it on a mountain top with someone’s “eyes on fire” for all the energy put into tossing this half-assery together.
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