“Hang Me Up to Dry”
from the album Robbers & Cowards
2006
iTunes
MP3 – “Hang Me Up to Dry” [right-click/save-as]
Cold War Kids are a lovable bunch of cheapskates. To date, the Whittier, California-based garage-blues foursome have shelled out a grand total of 60 bucks on the studio time required to record their three self-released EPs. Yet even that sum seems exorbitant to bassist Matt Maust. “It took them a long time to convince me to pop for a bass,” he says of his bandmates. “I didn’t wanna buy expensive things if this wasn’t gonna take off.”
Luckily, Maust has recouped his investment — and then some. Since forming a little over two years ago, Cold War Kids have sparked buzz the old-fashioned way: Their theatrical, high-energy shows, marked by singer Nathan Willett’s dramatic vibrato and frenetic moves, ignited a bidding war and earned them a slot at Lollapalooza last August. Now they’ve culled tracks from those EPs for their full-length debut Robbers & Cowards, to be released October 10 by new indie label Downtown Records (which has also put out albums by Art Brut and Gnarls Barkley).
Though the band’s handle suggests Reagan-era dance rock, Maust, Willett, guitarist Jonnie Russell, and drummer Matt Aveiro are more inspired by old saloon blues, update with a jolt of fresh electricity. On songs like “Hospital Beds,” Willett’s croon builds to a yelp while the band lights up a drunken piano-punk groove with creaky percussion. Like a more primitive Walkmen, these guys seem to have started a band in order to explore the verb clang — and, Willett jokes, to “disappoint all the adults in my life.”
As Cold War Kids prepare to play the Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavik this month, their profile is flourishing along with the indie-rock scene they’re most associated with, in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake. But Russell has a different explanation for their rise to fame. “People are hungary for something that has an element of rawness to it,” he says. And, who knows, they might even pay for it.