Blood Pressures | ||||
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Studio album by The Kills | ||||
Released | April 1, 2011 | |||
Studio |
Key Club Recording Company, MI unspecified studio in London, UK |
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Genre | Garage rock, indie rock, lo-fi | |||
Length | 41:54 | |||
Label | Domino | |||
Producer | Jamie Hince, Bill Skibbe | |||
The Kills chronology | ||||
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Singles from Blood Pressures | ||||
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Professional ratings | |
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Aggregate scores | |
Source | Rating |
Metacritic | 76/100 |
Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
AllMusic | |
BBC Music | Positive |
Clash | 9/10 |
NME | |
Paste | 8.6/10 |
Pitchfork | 6.4/10 |
Rolling Stone | |
The Skinny | |
Slant Magazine | |
Spin | 8/10 |
Blood Pressures is the fourth studio album by indie rock band The Kills. It was released on April 1, 2011 in Australia, on April 4, 2011 in Europe, and on April 5, 2011 in the United States and Canada. The album was recorded at Key Club studio in Benton Harbor, Michigan, the same studio where the band had previously recorded both No Wow and Midnight Boom. The album was promoted by four singles: "Satellite", "Future Starts Slow", "Baby Says" and "The Last Goodbye".
According to Q magazine, while the Midnight Boom album found the duo "moving away from their Suicide/Velvet roots" with hip hop beats and more considered approach, the fourth album "brings another change of gear", driven mostly by Mosshart’s recent stint in The Dead Weather.
Jesse Cataldo of Slant Magazine described the Kills's fourth album as "another mostly successful attempt to wrench effective material from a barebones method of hollow attitude and instrumental minimalism". Masters of "a high-wire act" involving "a small bag of tricks shaken up a little differently each time", the Kills "write songs that are invariably concave structures, spacious echo chambers for lurching, fuzzed-out guitar and softly staccato talk-singing", keeping "drawing blood from this stone, readjusting and tweaking their formula", the reviewer expands. According to Cataldo, "Starting with 2005's No Wow, The Kills have produced three almost skeletal meditations on the kind of black-hearted, fatalist sound originally fashioned by artists like Nick Cave. Each has fiddled with the proportions of straightforward stomp and slinky ambience: No Wow was sharp and spindly, ruled by the unsettling tremor of its omnipresent drum machines; Midnight Boom was in some ways a step in an even sparser direction, full of empty spaces and off-kilter melodies; and Blood Pressures pushes back into more forceful territory, leaning on noise and distortion and dropping most pretenses of subtlety."