“The Mayan was amazing,” said Alison Mosshart about a recent show she played at the downtown Los Angeles venue alongside her bandmate, The Kills‘ Jamie Hince. “It sounded perfect, the lights were heavenly, I never felt my legs, not even once,” she added, while speaking with KCRW‘s Jason Bentley before a live set The Kills played at Apogee Studios in Santa Monica on Wednesday, April 20. In comparison to their performance during the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Mosshart said the Los Angeles show was magical. “Coachella is like a game of survivor,” she said. “Between the cutting winds and sand searing my retinas, I can’t even see Jamie on stage.”

The band is touring, with Scott Paterson on bass and keyboards as well as Jonny Scott on drums, as they prepare to release Ash & Ice, their fifth studio album, for which they just launched the shot-in-Los Angeles video for the track “Heart of a Dog.” Hince called the short film, directed by Sophie Muller, an “updated L.A. version” of a video for “Last Day of Magic” the band created with Muller in 2008. “The first video we did with Sophie was in a house in London, and it was like a home video,” he said. Similarly, this new film has an intimate feeling, chronicling Hince and Mosshart during a Southern California day complete with poolside hammocks, palm trees, and a visit to the fittingly fluorescent Beverly Hills Union 76 gas station designed by Gin Wong and completed in 1965. Mosshart called the structure, at the corner of Crescent Drive and Little Santa Monica Boulevard her favorite gas station.

Mosshart said the process of writing albums for The Kills is much different than her work with The Dead Weather, the band Jack White formed with Mosshart, Dean Fertita, and Jack Lawrence. “In Nashville, everyone plays at once when we’re in the studio, it all happens really quickly.” Ash & Ice has been a longer process. Hince said “I’m surprised we finished it. There were such stormy seas, I didn’t think we would,” adding that he took a two-week ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway while writing songs for the new album. “You don’t see anything for two weeks but silver birch trees,” he added, describing the lengthy train journey. “As I get older, I find it’s more difficult to express myself in 4/4 time.”

Setlist:
“URA Fever”
“Hard Habit To Break”
“Heart of a Dog”
“Impossible Tracks”
“Black Balloon”
“Doing It To Death”
“Baby Says”
“Tape Song”
“Whirling Eye”
“Sour Cherry”
“Monkey 23”

By Elizabeth Varnell

Pictured: Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart of The Kills at Apogee Studios in Santa Monica.
Photo by Dustin Downing

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