Cold War Kids: “Loyalty to Loyalty”

September 24th, 2008 | 14:04

by, rigs

Loyalty to Loyalty, the latest from Fullerton, California’s Cold War Kids, bleeds ambition and effort. Valiant shots at social commentary and obtuse profundity abound. Musically, new doors are opened, then some are closed, and when they are, windows are vehemently broken to keep from monotony. However, these blogosphere honeys of 2006 stood no chance in 2008. Cold War Kids were most likely written off by hipster media, recently enlightened bloggers, and hapless critics before Loyalty to Loyalty was ever conceptualized by Willett and company. Possibly. But as music enthusiasts, we’re not here to pity them, just rip ‘em to shreds.

So, with that being said…

Loyalty is unlike its embraced predecessor Robbers & Cowards in many ways, the most blatant and rudimentary being it doesn’t have the same hooks. Robbers offered “Hang Me Out To Dry,” “We Used To Vaction” and “St. John”; these songs were destined to be sung along to, they were stitched into the quirky fabric of a guiltless indie pleasure like Weezer’s “… Sweater Song” was in 1994. Loyalty is much more daring, it leaves the Kids more vulnerable.

Willett refines the aggressive melodic yelp from Robbers and delivers a much more memorable vocal performance on Loyalty. Willett has always had a Jagermeister voice, and even more so on the new album (c’mon, there is no gray area when it comes to personal preference of Jager). For the most part Willett is somewhere between Jeff Buckley and Hamilton Leithauser with his vocal delivery; probably leaning towards a Buckley who was punched in the throat but didn’t give up on the melody, strained his vocals to the point of almost peaking out the mic, and when the session ended, the sound was left raw and thrashed without the clean up of post production or overdubs. However, on Loyalty to Loyalty, Willitt’s vocals are so much more than a token resemblance of past and present rock icons. Songs like “Against Privacy,” “Golden Gate Jumper,” “Avalanche in B” and “Cryptomnesia” exhibit a slow swooping drawl, with melodic lines that jump and slide across multiple notes, and phrasing that tastefully defies the explicit meter of the rhythm section – an overall jazzy blues style mindful of Billie Holiday. “Avalanche in B”, a third cousin of Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” and “You and Whose Army”, struggles with lag and lacks the vigor that could make it one of the more infectious songs on Loyalty, but leads nicely into “I’ve Seen Enough,” a rare head-bobber, full of movement and the album’s best fusion of rhythm, musical expression and passion.

Loyalty, like Robbers, is packed with aspiring philosophic and social banter, and although much of it gets lost in unfinished thoughts and obscure anecdotal quips, Willett, in an industry drowning in commercially charged filler, is at least giving us something to chew on: “I’ve seen enough / Of nothing new / The blackest stain on history / The last laugh blues” … “Not gonna shop around for one flag to fly” (from “I’ve Seen Enough”). “Relief” is a gritty, bass driven ruckus that parades Maust and Aveiro in unmatched continuity and creativity. The song would shine much brighter as a whole if Willett stuck to his strained gutty scream, rather than his less convincing falsetto.

“Cryptonmesia” may be Willett trying to match a feat similar to Thom Yorke’s when he seamlessly included myxomatosis into a song of the same name on Hail To The Thief or it may be one of the more interesting concepts on Loyalty. The aforementioned theoretical phenomenon is a form of “concealed recollection” where an artist believes they are creating something new but are actually recalling an identical work they experienced in the past. For Loyalty, Willett revisited an older song where he simply mumbled over the music with insensible nonsense and, in an effort to stage his own case study of cryptonmesia, wrote fresh discernible lyrics for the new album… you know, he was creating something new, but actually, it was something from the past and… I know, enough.

Together Willett and Russell explore broader sounds as guitarists, a much more concise and cohesive effort than that on Robbers. Matt Maust is impressive on bass, adding counter melodies and solidifying the collective sound of the band. His back end on “Mexican Dogs” acts like the bigger, stronger brother of Russell’s driving lead play, and his contribution to “Relief” is brilliant - he wrecks the left stereo mix with a riveting display of lead bass. Aveiro is much tighter and focused on Loyalty, often pushing the album where it begins to drag, although the loose play and seemingly inadvertent imagination on Robbers was quite refreshing. Loyalty’s production adheres to a primarily raw reverberated approach with wet guitars, a thick almost distorted bass guitar high in the mix, and low-end-heavy drums, keeping the general sound dirty and somewhat convoluted. On a more legal note, Willett may have stolen the piano riff from Carole King’s “I Feel The Earth Move” and used it on “Every Valley Is Not a Lake” (we’ll keep you updated).

So, bloggers unite, the critical fate of Loyalty to Loyalty is in our hands. By the way, big fan of Jagermeister here.