Part disco and part industrial, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s sound is somewhere between lounge music and biting punk rock. TKK takes cheesy guitar riffs, a pulsating disco beat and samples from old movies to produce something too explicit to be cute and too flippant to be just another industrial band.
On The Reincarnation of Luna, the band has meshed the two sounds to create a twisting, biting lounge act. The group has headed back from the darker feel of its last album, A Crime for All Seasons, to a more glammed-up sound.
Originally formed in 1987 in Chicago for a film project, singers and musicians Groovie Mann and Buzz McCoy wound up with a band instead. The TKK sound ranges from making you crave martinis to needing to blast your radio too loud. Either way, the infectious hooks reel you in.
The songs of Mann and McCoy have a sound track feel, each one telling a story. The music suggests a scene from a 1950’s B-movie — kitschy and bright, but ultimately sinister.
True to form, Luna starts out with a sampled and spooky number, “Radio Silicon.” The attitude returns on “The Untouchable Class,” a rowdy and sarcastic song backed by abrasive guitar chords. “Girl Without a Planet” reminds the listener of a Technicolor beach with Godzilla looming in the background. The song has a calypso beat and horns cooing in the background, but creepy lyrics (“Made up for the mirror/with makeup like a whore/A hurricane churns in her brain/Little Miss No Tomorrow”) lurk behind an otherwise innocent song. “Temptation Serenade,” while brazenly sexy, is an eerie, thumping disco number.
On previous albums, the slower songs dragged down the music, but not here. “Hour of Zero” relaxes in its leisurely sound with a touch of hip hop. The last song, “Theme De Luna,” is melancholy and slow with cryptic samples drifting behind piano chords.
But endless choruses weigh some songs down. And after redefining its sound more often than Madonna, one has to wonder if the group is creative or just lucky, hitting upon the right random sound at the right time. And once you’ve explored disco and industrial, how much further can you take your sound? Sexy, creepy and addictive, The Reincarnation of Luna sucks you in — if you like that sort of thing.
My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult performs Friday, Nov. 2 at Majestic Theatre.
Evelyn Aschenbrenner is a Metro Times intern. E-mail comments to [email protected].
