They may – as is customary for indie bands these days – have been ludicrously over-hyped (off the back of last year’s handful of stupidly intimate London shows) but Californian four-piece Cold War Kids are unquestionably a far more enticing prospect than your average bunch of guitar-slingers. Fusing Tom Waits, old blues records and mid-period Radiohead rather than the usual influences of The Clash and… well, The Clash, songs here such as single ‘Hang Me Out To Dry’ and the complex ‘Hospital Beds’ feel, in a good way, as if they may collapse at any second. Powered along by brittle, white funk basslines, they’re characterised by abrasive, almost intrusive percussion, constant, muso-friendly time signature changes and singer Nathan Willet’s primal howl – perhaps the most striking set of lungs to come from the other side of the Atlantic since Jack White. Lyrically, meanwhile, it’s all archetypal first person American storytellin’ (see opener ‘We Used To Vacation’ with its refrain of, ‘I promised to my wife and children/I’d never touch another drink as long as I lived’), making for an album that is by turns adventurously off-kilter, melodic and uncomfortable. A promising debut.
