A car pulls up outside a mid-sized club with a marquee that advertises one of the land’s most well known punk acts. A couple junior-high aged kids hop out, shyly wave to their mom inside the car and promise to meet at a nearby street corner at an appointed hour. They then join a line that includes several other pairs of youngsters out for a night of rock’n’roll.

Just what the heck is going on here? Wasn’t there a day when rock, and punk as an extension of rock’s most threatening elements, was downright scary? When no responsible parent would dare drag her children to a night of wild rock’n’roll, let alone let them wander into a den of smarmy rockers unchaperoned? Has rock really lost its bite? Has the over-saturation of bands, market forces and an influx of interest, fans and all the other things money so loves, finally pulled the last tooth from rock’s mouth?

No way, buddy. As long as there’s bands like The Kills out there, rock will remain gloriously outside the boundaries of middle-school night outs, pinup-style band posters and adoring mainstream coverage, and that’s just how part of the genre should be. While the duo, mysteriously known only as Hotel (most instruments and male vocals) and VV (female vocals, occasional guitar work), tempts comparisons to The White Stripes with its vintage sound and it’s boy/girl lineup, Black Rooster is a much, much more dingy album than anything the Detroit duo could ever dream up. With a sound that captures some of the gnarlier bits of the Estrus catalog (a garage racket), Sonic Youth (lo-fi noise and abrasion) and the punk ethic (a no-future, fuck-all mentality), this EP delivers four tracks that bear the weight of 45 years’ of rock’n’roll that’s not quite ready for the mainstream eye. Whether the pair conjures up tales of subterranean sex, violence and other teenage misbehavior ["Black Rooster (Fuck and Fight)"], or toys with a squirming barrage of slow, noisy riffs that’s one part garage-blues and one part that’s all The Kills’ own ("Wait"), The Kills are the sort of band that make desperate music for desperate people.

Recklessness shouldn’t come as a gleeful little treat in rock’n’roll, but it does. Black Rooster’s a joyful treat for anyone who still sees rock’n’roll as the music of outsiders, rebels and other unwanted souls rather than a soundtrack to conventional and predictable little lives.