Cold War Kids
Robbers and Cowards
[Downtown; 2006]
It may be true that "hipsters hate Jesus," as Pitchfork columnist Chris Dahlen claimed in January. Still, the bedheaded masses (Pitchfork included) are quick to bury any anti-Christian hatchets when they feel a particular work or artist warrants it, and their acceptance isn’t limited to old gospel cuts, the Louvin Brothers, or Johnny Cash. More recent critics’ darlings (Neutral Milk Hotel, Sufjan Stevens, Kanye West) have all won over whole tribes of heathens with songs of religious devotion.
Of course, Cold War Kids aren’t a Christian band. They’ve even said so. "No, no, we don’t wanna be that," lead singer Nathan Willett told OC Weekly. "Definitely not at all." Fair play: No one wants to be pigeonholed– not even Scott Stapp. Besides, the brand of religiosity hovering throughout this California quartet’s full-length debut is a little different from the hippie love-faith of "King of Carrot Flowers" or Seven Swans. Still, we indie rock fans aren’t as slow as we may look on Flickr. With superficial storytelling, monolithic melodies, and the heavy-handed symbolism of a school project, Robbers and Cowards insults our intelligence a few times too often.
It would help if the record lived up even a little bit to the mostly positive notices for Cold War Kids’ incessant live shows. On the strength of those shows, and a string of EPs, the band positioned itself as another potential breakout artist crowned by the emerging cabal of non-traditional tastemakers (the online press, blogs, TV and marketing music programmers, and, uh, Zach Braff). And yet, like too many of this year’s blogbuzzes, their most distinguishing feature is cozy familiarity; the sad reality is that the democratization of music-scouting too often results in listeners gravitating toward artists that sound like their favorite bands rather than unearthing new, brave, oft-ignored sounds.
So meet the new group, same as the old groups: Willett’s outsized vibrato blares and preens like a Jeff Buckley zombie, or at least a rock’n’roll Jason Mraz. The band navigates superfluous time-signature changes while zigzagging between edgy Spoon jitterscapes and White Stripes blooz-rawk affectations, with the occasional dive into the kind of clanking Eastern European gutter polka more deftly explored by Man Man, DeVotchka, and Rain Dogs. It’s a polished (if backward-looking) pastiche, cleaner and annoyingly louder on the album than on the three previous EPs.
While Robbers and Cowards largely swears off quasi-autobiographical songwriting in favor of preachy narratives, its best track is an exception to the rule. On "Hang Me Up to Dry", Willett swaggers amid jagged guitars and off-kilter pianos, stuttering like a veteran rock showman, and it’s almost fun enough that the song’s central relationship-as-laundry metaphor doesn’t need to make sense. Elsewhere, the songs weave cookie-cutter stories around such complex topics as alcoholic fathers, death row, and terminal illness. But hey, they’re just Kids: On prison howler "Saint John", Willett screams "ob-seen-it-ies" like someone who’s never heard the word before; on rootsy "Tell Me in the Morning", he’s "shouting questions like a fistfight." All the yelling and yammering eventually wears thin, but Cold War Kids do change pace. Soft/loud "God, Make Up Your Mind" drops smart-teenager surnames like Garcia Marquez and Salinger while debating whether it’s more effective to be a politician or a musician. Elsewhere, "Pregnant" meanders over acoustic strums, whistles, and an answering machine, as Willett recycles clichés like "pregnant with doubt" and "lift up the rug and sweep it underneath."
Unlike the idiosyncratic hymns of Sufjan Stevens or Jeff Mangum, Robbers and Cowards often relies on veiled evangelical boilerplates. Blue Staters might not recognize the rote figurative language right away, but many others will: how "put out the fire on us" from "Hospital Beds" signifies a call for baptism, or how the sudden shift on "Saint John" to "All us boys on death row/ We’re all waiting for a pardon" is a reminder that we’re each of us sentenced to die unless we accept God’s redeeming grace. Teetotalism, original sin, and abstinence until marriage also loom large– particularly striking in a musical tradition that traces its roots through the gritty nihilism of the Velvet Underground, who used Judeo-Christian language to their own avant-garde ends.
At the end of hidden track "Sermons vs. the Gospel", which dismisses The New York Times, psychoanalysis, and European vacations before somehow absolving "stealing from the poor," Willett yowls, "Lord, have mercy on me/ I believe the words can change the heart" (another Salinger reference); "When you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart," said George W. Bush in a 2000 presidential debate. There’s no objective reason a record of musically or ideologically conservative indie rock couldn’t succeed on its own terms, like my favorite recent country records, but this isn’t the one. It doesn’t even want to be.