There was a time the Cold War Kids thrived as the soul-punk connoisseurs of the New Millenium.
They brought bristle. They brought ruckus. They even dealt Death Cab for Cutie a fatal – and necessary – blow.
Their ascendancy, as it seemed, was quick and painless – and showed no signs of diminishing.
Yet ever since their dazzling 2004 debut with the Mulberry Street EP and the full-length Robbers and Cowards, the Long Beach-based hipster quartet – helmed by vocalist Nathan Willett – have been fighting a painful and unexpected decline.
They looked to indie mega-producer Jacquire King as an inroad.
“All of our music has always been written entirely by us without any influence, so to have him step in and help us with the direction is tremendous,” Willett gushed in an interview with Filter Magazine. “He is going to work miracles with us.
The songs are different so far as taking the sheer time to really look at every detail of every song, and seeing how it can be recorded in different ways and looking back, taking notes, and really working hard that way.
That’s going to naturally make the record sound different; the songs are going to be a little less jangly and much more emphatic. I think it’s our best one yet.”
Yet despite King’s golden touch, the Cold War Kids’s third studio release – 2011’s Mine is Yours – is, in a central sense, all bark and no bite.
Whereas Robbers & Cowards’s blend of funked-out rhythms provided flair – and remarkable dimension – to a near-flawless debut, the gang’s latest endeavor circles the drain in a deluge of washed-out, soulless ditties almost devoid of spunk.
“With this record we did everything backwards,” Willett explained to Scene Magazine.
“We went into the studio with about 40 ideas, no full songs written, but a lot of ideas, a lot of melodies. We spent a whole month just working those ideas and taking them as far as we could take them and then moving to a different studio and really doing all the tracking at the next studio for an additional month.”
Mine is Yours’s title track is a B-grade, Kings of Leon-inspired track hampered by Willett’s preachy warblings, which stew helplessly in the track’s too-pretty instrumentation and reappear in the repetitive “Louder Than Ever.”
Willett – to his credit – slowly but surely regains some pace on “Royal Blue,” syncopating a familiar blend of fresh-faced and eclectic stringwork with plaintive howls, at least before losing his moorings in “Finally Begin.”
A weak suite of tunes ensue, including the forgettable “Out of the Wilderness” and “Skip the Charades” before Mine is Yours’s most compelling track reigns the album in from a point of no return.
“Sensitive Kid,” a jittery – yet grimly beautiful – gem of a track, recalls Robbers & Cowards’s off-kilter soundscape, featuring Willett’s funked-out, blues-worthy vocals over gentler, more spare percussive touches.
All in all, Mine Is Yours is a scatterbrained body of work which plummets, face-first, into failure and banality.
While the album demonstrates skilled instrumentation, it ultimately fails to distinguish itself from the same mediocre indie fare served up by the Cold War Kids’s cookie-cutter colleagues.
