Cold War Kids
Hold My Home
Create Control / Downtown
With their fifth
cut since 2004, Southern Californian quartet Cold War Kids have crossed a sonic
divide. Virtually gone (in an obvious, 12-bar sense) is the blues influence
that permeated their earlier music, in its place a freewheeling, upbeat
feeling, all handclaps and sing-a-long choruses, layered guitars and booming
piano, swirling B3, a psychedelic pop gem that bumps and grinds along, waving
cheekily at the blues it’s left behind (but still secretly loves and misses),
barefoot and fancy free.
Opener ‘All This
Could Be Yours’, driven by Matthew Schwartz’s pounding piano, draws a blueprint
for the rest of the album – ‘Hot Coals’ builds to a shimmering crescendo;
‘Nights & Weekends’ is all psych-layered warmth; ‘Harold Bloom’ brings it
back, sparse, a melding of REM and Pink Floyd. The riff-led ‘Hotel Anywhere’ is
perhaps the bluesiest track on the record, a nod to where they’ve been, on an
album which, as a whole, sees a band who will embrace change without a second
thought, doing it well.
3/5
Samuel J. Fell
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