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The U.K. garage thrashers, The Kills, return from a three-year hiatus for their third studio album, “Midnight Boom,” bringing scratchy, abrasive sounds and fresh lyrics to the forefront. Unlike the White Stripes and other female-male duos, Allison “VV” Mosshart and James “Hotel” Hince turn away from the bluesy-rock archetype to lift their sound to an unsteady cool.
With their first single, “U.R.A. Fever,” Mosshart and Hince exchange sassy vocals to heighten the grainy guitar licks under sleek, laidback tones. With lyrics like, “You are a fever / You are a fever / You ain’t born typical,” spoken over a telephone dial tone, the song delivers an inventive groove befitting to their style.
Tracks like “Sour Cherry” and “Getting Down” breed high energy, mid-tempo fire-starters, providing bouncy melodies, hand claps and onomatopoeic echoes.
For bitter and atmospheric overtones, The Kills dip into slow, melancholic moods on the finale song, “Goodnight Bad Morning.” Smooth piano chords and humming guitar licks fulfill the rest of the sweet, nostalgic track.
Overall, this short but stingy album keeps the listener attentive to the band’s balance between ultra-sexy and rough indie styles. The Kills still manage their flare for erratic guitars and creative beats, adding more chemistry to an already appealing sound.

flathatnews.com

It’s taken more than a decade, but Portishead have finally come out with a new album. Kevin Courtney goes beyond the press release to discover what took these slow-groovers so long, and wonders if this is the beginning of a rebirth for Bristol’s trip-hop scene
IT’S ALWAYS the way: you’re about to interview some band or pop star, when a twitchy record company executive jumps in front of you and says: “Don’t ask about the divorce/dead rock star husband/child molestation charge/plastic surgery/Johnny Marr/gerbil.”
There’s always one question you’re not allowed to ask, and the obvious one for Geoff Barrow of trip-hop legends Portishead is, simply, why so long? It’s been 10 years since their last album, twice the time it took for The Stone Roses to engineer their second coming. But this is the one question I’m barred from asking. Have Portishead gone all Courtney Love on us?
Nah, there’s a simple reason that the monumentally slow-grooving trio are in a hurry to skirt the subject: it might take up too much precious interview time when they could be talking about music and stuff. So they’ve prepared a handy press release that addresses the thorny issue of the band’s decade-long hiatus.
It says that following a hectic four years between the release of the Mercury Music Prize-winning Dummyin 1994 and the mixing of the Live at the Roseland NYC album in 1997, beatmaster Geoff Barrow, singer Beth Gibbons and guitarist Adrian Utley “went home, emotionally and physically exhausted”.
Geoff, the intense music-obsessive whose dense beats and brooding samples gave Portishead their signature style, took a complete break from music to “try and rebuild some semblance of a home life”. No abstinence for the other two, though: Adrian, the veteran session man whose r’n'b/jazz/rock guitar style brought a hipster aesthetic to the mix, kept busy with production, soundtrack and live work.

ireland.com