They were gone for a while, but the album Midnight Boom has put The Kills back on my radar.

Lyrically, I'm not sure what to make of the skeletal single "U. R. A. Fever" just yet, having gleaned nothing from it beyond a general celebration of the whole sunglasses-after-dark vibe. "You only ever had her when you were a fever": what does that mean? And is it important to me? Only slightly.

I like the sounds, however. The inert programmed beat that's as dead-eyed as it is simmering, and the corrosive guitar. And I like the whiff of old fashioned decadence that surrounds this dirty duo, even if it has been rendered quaint by mainstream culture's accelerating amorality.

The Kills are big on what they call "the total experience," which is their way of describing the deliriously adolescent and old-skool notion that one can live one's art.

I'd argue people do that without even thinking these days.

But in the case of VV (vocals, vagina), and Hotel (vocals, instruments, penis), it means piling on the kind of subcultural references that have waning currency, but old world charm, in this democratically hip and unimpressed era. Warhol, punk, Berlin, speed...

The album itself would have been considered quite something in 1992. In "Cheap and Cheerful," we get to hear the Shangri-Las at their most prettily perverse: "I want you to be crazy 'cause you're boring baby when you're straight...."

"The Tape Song" suggests PJ Harvey fronting the artfully nihilistic New York synth duo Suicide.

And suicide, or a suicide pact, seems to be at the heart of "Getting Down," in which Hotel reveals a vocal proximity to Stephen McBean. So we can maybe add the first, similarly backward-facing Pink Mountaintops album to the list of "awesome things The Kills remind us of."

Throw in the Velvet Underground, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra refracted through decades of narcosis, city sickness and pop cultural decay, and it should be abundantly clear what to expect from Midnight Boom: yesterday's cool.

I like to think that it's the sheer force of belief that has rendered Hotel into a Lou Reed look-alike, with all the mid-'70s bad diet and hate restored. VV, meanwhile, told me a couple of years ago in an interview, "I was absolutely addicted to Edie Sedgwick. And her life was just a complete piece of art. Just to go to the shop next door, she'd spend like four hours getting ready."

Well, that was then. And how many hours does the average Facebook teen spend alone in the bathroom with a camera?

The Kills will play Vancouver's Richard's on Richards on May 14, 2008. There are no other B.C. dates planned.

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