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The Kills:
No Wow
I really tried hard with this album. Honestly! As a proud Kills fan, I was waiting anxiously for their second album, No Wow, which actually has been out now for a few months. Early press reports sang the praises of No Wow, and I was excited to do the same. The band certainly deserves a lot of praise, but I have trouble with dumping such accolades upon this, their second LP. Whats bugging me? No Wow is undeniably a departure from Keep on Your Mean Side. Neither LP is flawless, but Keep on Your Mean Side had a handful of tracks that rocked out much harder than anything we get here. And you needed a ferocious attack like Fuck the People to make calmer songs like Monkey 23 sound interesting. The Kills still inject you with lots of tension on every No Wow track, but they never take it anywhere aggressive enough. First of all, the chorus lyrics repeat again and again in every song, and when the music goes nowhere from the opening riffs on a track like The Good Ones or Dead Road 7 you begin to wonder why a three-minute song seems to be capable of lasting an eternity. Actually, some of VVs verses in many of these songs are intriguing, but every chorus on the entire album is a letdown. The Kills tension just fizzles out when you hit the choruses of tracks like Rodeo Town and Love Is a Deserter. The songs still have some harsh bluesy riffs, but I really wish these songs would step up to their full potential. No Wow does offer two pretty good exceptions to all my whining. Murdermile seems to have the heaviest riff on the album, and this alternates fairly well with the stripped down feeling pervading this album. Still, the best song is the albums namesake and lead single No Wow if you can get past the fact that VV repeats the phrase No Wow about 10,000 times. The only reason this track works at all is that the song gets louder and more aggressive as it progresses, the crucial element that is missing on every other song on this album. I still like No Wow, but its a serious sidestep away from the strengths The Kills displayed on their debut. So I implore you to check out The Kills fantastic debut if you have not yet heard them. If youre already a fan, No Wow will still probably appeal to you, but you better turn the volume way up if you want to get that rush that came so effortlessly on their first release.
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