The kills last goodbye jack white biography

Just in time to commemorate their 10-year anniversary as a band, The Kills’ 2012 EP The Last Goodbye opens on a dirge of a title track with Alison Mosshart singing over an antique parlor piano and distant string accompaniment.

The trek continues in April in San Diego and runs through Coachella, then restarts in late summer or early fall for a longer trip around the country. A spare cover of Ken Darby and Lionel Newman’s “One Silver Dollar” (originally sung by Marilyn Monroe in the 1954 western River of No Return) keeps close to the original recording’s simple structure of one Spanish-flavored acoustic guitar and one sultry chanteuse.

With Mosshart on tour, Hince says, “maybe I let loose with instruments a bit more than I would’ve done. “You don’t get to take home a thing. Jamie Hince perfectly nails the dirty-toned vintage guitar distortion, and the drumming mirrors Moe Tucker’s cymbal-free style of bombastic percussion.

The difference of layers, more instruments — that might dictate having to take someone else out with us.”

The record’s first single, “Satellite,” a crunchy gospel-flavored track, launched Jan. 31 as a stream, accompanied by radio availability and a video directed by Sophie Mueller, creator of the band’s memorable “Last Day of Magic” clip.

The Kills are documenting their tour on Polaroid cameras, with the photos available on Polaroid’s website. It’s so much bigger, in fact, that the band members note it might require a different setup when they take it on the road.

“We’ve always been quite keen on keeping it the two of us,” Hince says, “but after this long, we wanted to experiment on the record.

For the “Satellite” video, the duo went to England’s Canvey Island, a Coney Island-like resort area that has fallen out of favor, which Hince describes as “kind of a ghost town now.”

The Kills’ first tour date was March 17 at Domino’s South by Southwest showcase. “The band have long used Polaroid cameras throughout their career in both art and life, so it seemed like an incredibly natural fit to the band’s visual aesthetic,” Gillespie says.

That aesthetic will be on display in a vinyl release, with a full-art insert and a colored-vinyl record, as well as a 28-page booklet for the CD version — all designed by Mosshart and Hince.

I’d never done that before, so that was my learning song; that was the song I invented to learn how to do it quickly and play,” she says.

Whatever the inspiration, be it distance, the first Roxy Music record or Hince’s childhood in Swaziland, “Blood Pressures” is a bigger, broader, more expansive rock record that still maintains the Kills’ signature swagger and sass.