KILL THE PAIN

Kill The Pain? Qu’est-ce que c’est?

If you have time, read below… otherwise listen here:

Well, what do you get when you cross Les Rita Mitsouko with Dolly Parton? Not just the Dolly of exquisite vocal styling but also the one of 9 to 5, the Communist Manifesto for today’s working classes? Or what do you get when Phoebe Killdeer, singer songwriter of #1 international hit The fade out lines, gathers with her alter ego Mélanie Pain, the voice behind the success of Nouvelle vague who’s two decades old but still razor sharp?

Gather round, kids, and listen…

Back in 2005, Phoebe Killdeer and Melanie Pain were thrown together on stage with the French band Nouvelle Vague. Rehearsals? No. Knowing each other? Not even. The two ladies barely met eyes when the chemistry began: one part irony, one part equality gave rise to a kind of play, a giving-not-taking — to each other but, more important, to the audience. Getting along to say the least…

500 concerts later, during a lull in Paris, something newer than the nouvelle happened: a heady mix of writing and jamming, punctuated by a glass of wine, morphed into a quick-and-dirty trial-and-error way of working and playing, low-key, fast-paced, and above all fun.

Phoebe and Mélanie emerged from these experimentations as Kill the Pain (KTP) a stripped-down, souped-up dynamic duo who stands on the shoulders of Nouvelle Vague (NV). But where NV reached back with its relentless rethinks of punk classics, KTP reaches forward — with one hand for the stars, the other for the gutter, literally moving between nostalgic styles, disrupting time as much as they can with shameless pleasure. Their vocals come even more to the fore than before: pure and raw, driving and intimate, tightly wound one moment, louche the next, bobbing around and weaving together a stunning range of material.

For some bands a style is something to settle on, but for Kill The Pain, styles — plural — are things to unsettle: personas to adopt, stories to tell, stones to roll as they gather the moss of far-flung influences and inspirations: from Carmen McRae to the Slits, from ESG’s raw drive to Peggy Lee’s poetic musicality, from pent-up force of Patti Smith to Kim Gordon sardonic lyricism. KTP owes some to the hypnagogic-pop The Wire’s David Keenan wrote of a decade ago, but freed, finally, from the anxiety of influence.

The duo sums it up perfectly in its first two singles: "I don't know what YOU do... but I do what I do" heard on the track I do what I do, sounds like a joyful and liberating mantra. "Zig zag wandering, just like that" on the single Zig Zag is a gleeful incantation to sidestep obstacles and negative energies with humour and spontaneity. Musically, it's a happy mess, an assertive helter-skelter of Latin percussion, funky bass, spicy electric guitars, uninhibited vocals, Afro beat drums and 80's keyboards.

Kill The Pain, in the tradition of outlandish women in pop culture, the duo are completely different and enable each other to reach a state of craziness together - in the line of films like Thelma and Louise, Daisies or the scene in Tarantino’s Kill Bill with the 5,6,7,8´s playing on stage, Phoebe and Melanie could fit right in…

Like the collage illustrations that go with their kaleidoscope of musical genres, things could and most certainly will take an unexpected turn.

By Alex Murray-Leslie (Chicks On Speed)