Texas, Day 2

In reference to Texas, day 2: Each story has a vivid atmosphere. As Alison Mosshart describes a scene, you’re getting the very essence of her surroundings. They’re living portraits.

“Just woke up at a gas station outside Austin, watching the highway, remembering Houston,” Mosshart shared on Instagram. “Looking out the window at the tangled brush, green fields, big trucks, getting excited about the gig at Stubbs tonight…”

If you’re even remotely familiar with Mosshart’s artwork, her deep love of adventure and cars, you’ll understand the aforementioned blurb is barely a snippet of the observations she brings to life, but you can hear it being read in her voice. It’s best to lose yourself in something like Sound Wheel, a fantastical spoken word/musical journey of rumination and storytelling, the sonic companion piece to Mosshart’s art book Car Ma. Funny, eerie, and genuine; sound and visual collage like mad; moods, restless, poetry, razor sharp observation and a wit to match; an ongoing ode to endless connections with the automobile. (Stop everything and listen to “Minefield” – it will send you, as it did the narrator, into giggles.)

Doesn’t feel as though Mosshart and collaborator Jamie Hince haven’t released an LP as The Kills in seven years. Super powers combined, theirs is a combustible energy that doesn’t slumber. God Games, in Hince’s words “a record of godless spirituals,” carries every ounce of Kills power and menace with the self-awareness of destiny. Fate is in your hands. Get behind the wheel of that damned muscle car and floor the pedal, 180 mph, toward the direction of your choosing.

If ya gotta stop, stop to do a show. The Kills play in the ATX tonight, Friday March 8, at Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater on Red River. Doors at 8 p.m., and the night begins with London-based artist Jojo Orme’s goth-tinged post-punk project Heartworms. Later, Austin artist and AMM fave Lauren Lakis plays the afterparty show on Stubb’s indoor stage.

High octane. The highway is for conquering.