For a minute there, Cold War Kids looked like the saviors of intelligent, conceptual rock and roll. When their first album, Robbers and Cowards, was released in 2006, it caught most of us who follow indie-rock off-guard. It was slickly produced and unabashed in its stadium aspirations, but it carried the weight of thoughtful lyricism and progressive musical tendencies.
In other words, Cold War Kids looked poised to be the Phil Collins-era Genesis of the 2000s: Loved by many, huge in the mainstream and hated by a large group of too-cool-for-you hipsters. It all went wrong after a couple of hits and the band disappeared from the public eye. However, with new strong material under their belt, are the Kids making a comeback nobody has caught on to yet?
2006 was a great year for Cold War Kids. Their album Robbers and Cowards was stunning in its musical urgency and emotional poignancy. It was right up in your face, but songs like "We Used to Vacation" crossed life experiences to cause so many of us to relate strongly to its message.
I've never been married or missed my son's graduation, yet I think we've all done stupid things while fucked up. It tapped into a deep well of regret with a conceptual that carried its way brilliantly across the record.
"Hang Me Up to Dry" was huge. It was that big inescapable hit that the whole album was looking for, and it broke through exactly as everyone expected it would. All goals of this record seemed to be met. Game, set, match. Cold War Kids were on top of the world they set out to conquer.
Unfortunately, it's a hard world in which to lead a conquest, and an even harder one to maintain your grip on. Their sophomore slump came on hard with Loyalty to Loyalty in 2008. It followed the same formula, but the critical reception was murky.
By 2011's Mine Is Yours, it had been five years since Cold War Kids first broke, and it seemed their formula was broken. The record was a tepid listen. Its music was pedestrian and missed out on whatever made this band so magical in the first place. It showed a band lost in its attempts to reclaim what it felt was rightfully theirs in the first place. Their own message was lost among shoddy songwriting and weak production.
The band even brought in Jacquire King, producer for Kings of Leon, to try to make it something special. But in grasping for the success that the Kings were experiencing at that point, the Kids sold their own souls. It seemed like they were done. Certainly I wrote them off, sweeping the record from my mind and skipping their next live performance in town.
The odds are at that point that a band is done. Comebacks happen, but they're rare. For the most part, when you have one great record and two bad ones in a row, your batting average is not going to suddenly improve.
But like a football team with a great quarterback down by 20 in the fourth quarter, you just can't write off Cold War Kids.
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