Last Friday’s hot, hot, hot show from the Kills got me thinking about Alison Mosshart’s other band, Discount.

I doubt anyone can accurately map the distance between a forward-thinking Gainesville, FL punk band (Discount) and Mosshart’s surprisingly personal reinvention as the sexy, chain-smoking, faux-Brit fronting, Royal Trux’ing band, the Kills. Plus, it wasn’t long after Discount hung up the hoodie for good that Mosshart suddenly reappeared overseas in this new persona.

It was like she had an evil twin.

But while she fronted Discount—who rolled deep with the likes of Hot Water Music and Dismemberment Plan—Mosshart was the reclusive fanzine scribbler who would rarely face the crowd and was like a ghost after the band went off stage. It wasn’t quite “damaged goods” material—she wasn’t a backstage cutter or anything—but Mosshart’s shy presence added a great deal of heft to the band’s intelligent stab at killing pop-punk dead in its Chuck Taylors.

At first the band was one of many borrowing from the Tilt franchise, although even their earliest songs (see “Portrait of a Cigarette” below) showed a band who, if they managed to harness the songwriting of Mosshart, could evolve far behind the normally rigid rules of suburban punk rock.

The band did just that with 2000’s Crash Diagnostic, an excellent J.Robbins produced album that found the quartet restless with three chords and some empty ideas. While they might have bid farewell to their pop-punk fanbase (Although looking back on it now, the record doesn’t seem that different. It’s kind of like the ridiculous anger over Jawbreaker’s slick Dear You which was such a huge deal years ago, but now just seems trivial. That record is great, too bad it took me half a decade to realize it.), they did gain the attention from some cooler indie bands (see the aforementioned Dismemberment Plan) and were poised for some crossover success. But their label, New American Dream, went tits up and the band disappeared back to Florida, eventually breaking up after a farewell tour that came nowhere near Portland.

Here’s hoping that some Kills fans do the work to unearth Discount’s catalog. It might not be as hip, but there’s something a whole lot more authentic about Mosshart back when she was a punk kid battling stage fright while cloaked in a hoodie.

MP3:
Discount - Portrait of a Cigarette
(from Singles Collection Volume 2, buy it here)

Discount - Math Won’t Miss You
(from Crash Diagnostic, buy it here)