Click to listen to The Kills' Blood Pressures

Boys, boys — no need to fight! There's plenty of Alison Mosshart to go around! After teaming up with Jack White to form the Dead Weather, and making two superbly raunchy blues-hound records in two years, Mosshart brings it on home to her original guitar mate Jamie Hince to reunite the Kills. Mosshart always sings like she can't wait for the song to end so she can bury a machete deep in the scalp of her latest doomed lover — but something about her brings out the beast in her guitar dudes. The chemistry between Mosshart and Hince must be more intense than ever, because their fourth album is also their finest.

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The London garage-punk duo have beefed up their once-minimal sound. Hince may be Kate Moss's main man but he makes his guitar live up to all the lust and danger in Mosshart's voice. There's a new attention to variety and sonic details on Blood Pressures, with a touch of goth gospel in the backing vocals. Alongside the usual scrappy blues rants ("Nail in My Coffin") there are surprises like the poignant film noir torch song, "The Last Goodbye," and the Sixties mod discotheque ambience of "Satellite." All over Blood Pressures, the Kills build up a mood of seething sexual tension — like everybody in the club is getting hot but nobody's getting lucky.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."