April 9, 2003

Raised on the punk credo that confusion is sex, the two sonic youths in London's Kills get off on keeping each other guessing. On Keep on Your Mean Side, their full-length follow-up to 2002's Black Rooster EP, the cryptically named Hotel and VV – a.k.a. Jamie Hince and Discount's Alison Mosshart – truck in mixed messages, trading off fuck-offs and come-ons like they're one and the same: "Get my name stitched on your lips"; "Gonna stab your kissy, kissy mouth"; and, more to the point, "Wanna fuck and fight?" Such ambiguous, menacing sex appeal keeps the duo's Royal Trux-style trash blues thrillingly unpredictable – a feat that's practically unheard of in today's generally straightforward, tired garage rock revival.

Like the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs, their closest contemporaries, the Kills create raucous sleaze rock primarily from guitar and drums. On the excellent Keep on Your Mean Side, their minimalist garage-isms are fleshed out by organ, harmonica, and even electric viola, but it's the vox that distinguish the Kills from their peers. VV, an American expat finding her inner PJ Harvey, has the curled-lip lisp and sneering-as-singing down pat, and Hotel's Lou Reed affect is rousing. And when they interrupt, crisscross, and answer each other, as on highlights "Cat Claw," "Hitched," and "Fuck the People," the Kills walk the thin line between love, lust, and hate like no one else. The Kills perform Sat/19, Bottom of the Hill, S.F. (415) 626-4455. (Jimmy Draper)

Fabolous
Street Dreams (Elektra/Desert Storm)

It's hard to actively dislike Fabolous since there's so little about him that's active at all. His voice barely registers above a disinterested mumble, his rhymes borrow liberally from the thug canon, and the fact that he raps comfortably over any kind of beat says less about his versatility than it does his generally mopish presence. The 23-year-old Brooklyn native's second album, Street Dreams, retraces familiar ground in familiar ways, and the effect is that Fab becomes sort of a human throwback jersey – he's got flash and sex appeal to spare, but he's clearly of the moment, like an '89 Rob Deer and Air Force Ones with little Burberry decals.

The cowbells and knee slaps of the monotonously bangin' "Damn" suit Fab's flow well as he reels off a series of brags memorable only for a dangling reference to "liquor the color of Smurf skin." His prodigy-meets-prodigy duet with Ashanti, "Into You," is an embarrassment of nouveau riches that calls to mind fellow too-much- too-sooners Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler. Even "This Is My Party" sounds downright robotic, a true shame since its Lesley Gore interpolation is pretty hot. Too pretty to thug and too young for modesty, Fabolous's ultimate problem is one of audience. His lazy-eye flow has enough ooze for any situation, but he lacks the oomph to play any angle too effectively. He pulls the short straw when he posses with Styles and Jadakiss and hard-rocks M.O.P. for "Keepin' It Gangsta," and he doesn't do much better paired with the seasoned Mary J. Blige on "My Life," the album's obligatory moment of introspective closure. Rather, Fab's most comfortable on the bonus cut, "Throwback," rewriting Rakim and bragging, "It ain't where you for, it's where you wear ya throwback at." Holla back, indeed. (Hua Hsu)

Aphex Twin
26 Mixes for Cash (Warp)

One hundred and thirty-eight minutes is a lot of Richard D. James. 26 Mixes for Cash, a double-CD collection of his mercenary work during the past 10 years, lets the listener into the mind of an artist who has used sleep deprivation as a creative aid and is rumored to have spent all of his nonperformance time on a recent tour either crying or watching porn. You have to wonder whether you want to be inside such a mind.

But regardless of whether he makes you moan or groan, Aphex Twin's music is anything but boring and predictable. There are certainly no clues to his direction given by the original versions of the songs he remixes. In the case of Nine Inch Nails' "The Beauty of Being Numb," he never even listened to the original and simply turned in one of his own creations, a delicately droning collection of keyboards, buzzes, and acidic burps that fades into what sounds like a duel between a drinking straw and a truly incompetent clarinet player. In other places, like on his reworking of Gentle People's "Journey," large chunks of the original are left untouched as James stretches the rest of the song into a spacey, reflexive symphony.

There are definite moments of brilliance. His powerful version of Philip Glass and David Bowie doing Bowie's "Heroes" is majestic and moving, and Wagon Christ's "Spotlight" becomes an aggressively ricocheting aggregation of percussion. But with the occasional flimsy toss-off like DMX Krew's "You Can't Hide Your Love," and a host of sounds or rhythms that appear on multiple tracks, one is left wondering how often James was snickering to himself as he turned in the tapes. (Peter Nicholson)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Fever to Tell (Interscope)

While the White Stripes recently released an entire album on the subject, the full-length and major-label debut from garage rock's other hottest guitar-and-drums act makes for far more compelling commentary on the death of a sweetheart. Recorded in New York City and mixed by Alan Moulder (U2, My Bloody Valentine), Fever to Tell finds Brooklyn's Yeah Yeah Yeahs augmenting their famously unhinged rock with some unexpectedly subtle, poignant moments about love's fleeting nature and the loss of old-fashioned courtship. "I was wrong, it never lasts," Karen O laments. "There is no modern romance."

There is, however, enough exhilarating, white-hot rock on Fever to Tell to exceed all of the hype heaped on the trio. Finally capturing the Yeahs' fiery, fuck-all live energy – something the self-titled and Machine EPs failed to fully do – the album fleshes out guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase's skeletal, scuzzy instrumentation with synths for the first time. The result is the band at their most sinister-sexy and eclectic: "Tick" and especially first single "Date with the Night" nearly rattle themselves apart with enraged momentum, while moody, make-out highlights "Maps" and "Modern Romance" show off the band's new softer side.