I haven’t followed Cold War Kids’ career closely enough, really, already a fourth album? And they are tremendously big now, the line for their in-store at Amoeba on Monday night was a superstar line, with rows and rows of kids waiting around the block hours before the show. I am always surprised that so many people are out of job or out of school, but it is a fact that these Amoeba shows are becoming more and more popular.
Anyway, it was a large crowd for a stadium-sized sound, as the quintet did sound big and confident on the small stage, with singer Nathan Willet’s powerhouse falsetto vocals leading the game during their eight-song set. They started with two new songs off their brand new ‘Dear Miss Lonelyhearts’, first, ‘Loner Phase’, which had an interesting combination of dance-y beats and sweeping-bombastic synth wrapped by a sort of Depeche-More-meets-the Killers sound, then ‘Miracle Mile’, the catchy album opener with a repetitive opening piano note à la Arcade Fire, which could be the hit of the album. But, amazingly, despite all these diverse references, these songs had this Cold War Kids’ signature sound, at least the one I remember about.
Willet and his bandmates were moving a lot on stage, and I realized that one of them was wearing a t-shirt printed with that famous Charlotte Gainsbourg smoking a cigarette picture… How cool! Switching to older songs, they demonstrated how diverse and inventive their sound could be at time, something that can’t be said of many bands which have written the same song one hundred times. ‘Relief’ off their ‘Loyalty to Loyalty’ album is a weird growling synth behind Willett’s expressive falsetto, while their old one ‘Rubidoux’ deploys a military drumming and 'Royal Blue' and its familiar-at-the-first-listening chorus is their typical big-hook-driven rock song. They played another new one, the piano-driven ‘Jailbird’, before ending without notice with the atypical retro-surf-y, even a little Black Keys sounding ‘Minimum Day’.
The new album sounds quite interesting, I regret they didn’t play ‘Tuxedos’, a slow one as Nathan Willett’s croon is especially soulful on that one, even a little Lennon-esque, plus there is another called ‘Fear & Trembling’,… What, a Kierkegaard reference?
Setlist
Loner Phase
Miracle Mile
Audience
Relief
Royal Blue
Jail Birds
Rubidoux
Minimum Day
