Album Of The Week: Cold War Kids’ Hold My Home

There’s something beautiful about how a great band can progress with each album they put out. You can tell the good ones from the horrible ones that give you headaches by the material they have and how they’ve grown. They stick to what made them good in the first place and build off it, they get experimental and create genre bending brilliance, or they can be like the horrible ones and completely fall off the deep end. One band that deserves to be put in the group of the good ones are Long Beach, Calif., soul rockers Cold War Kids and their powerful new album, Hold My Home. This release is like a musical machine gun with each track unloading pure emotional energy and genuine feeling.

Chock full of piano riffs, seismic drums and skull crushing rhythms to go with Nathan Willett’s booming voice, Hold My Home does the impossible and takes a sound that’s already dynamic and brings it to a whole new level. The downbeats really hit your soul; it’s as if Cold War Kids got heightened superpowers and are playing like superheroes. You can’t ignore the spine-tingling guitar from Dann Gallucci, either; his licks are the cherry on top of a delicious sundae of an album. The synth strays away from the raw sound that they started with, but it shows them progressing, while at the same time keeping it real. When it comes down to it, Hold My Home could very well be Cold War Kids’ best album they’ve put out this decade.

Let’s get ironic people! In New England it’s about to be flu season and because of that, everyone is going to think they’re getting Ebola when in fact it’s probably a case of the common cold. Can you sense the irony? What isn’t ironic are my top tracks off of the Album Of The Week. Relax with some remedies.

I’ve fallen in love with “Drive Desperate.” When the drums and pianos combine to create a fantastically supreme beat, your jaw will drop. The lead single of “All This Could Be Yours” is a groovy number where you can cut a rug to the six-string as it shines over the rest of the band. “Flower Drum Song” starts out fuzzy and then the piano sounds like an organ from hell during the chorus.

Cold War Kid’s Website: http://www.coldwarkids.com

Cold War Kids will be starting up a little tour of California starting off at The Observatory in Santa Ana on November 18^th and next year they’ll be making a stop at The House Of Blues in Boston on March 21^st. The wait might be long, but I highly suggest you get yourself a copy of Hold My Home. It’s an amazing album that’ll knock you off your feet.