Cold War Kids, Loyalty to Loyalty

Cold War Kid Nathan Willett has strong opinions. He thinks it's crappy that systems have the power over individuals in contemporary America: "Whistle blowers gotta get out of school/They don't want poets, they want pigeons on a stool," he sings in "Welcome to the Occupation." He thinks it's heroic when people abandon their selfish materialism and focus on community: "We're against privacy," he sloganeers in "Against Privacy," "and we're waiting for your call." He even has opinions about people he's never met: he thinks that women preparing to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge just need a helping hand extended in their direction, and that old men lose themselves in improbable reveries to escape the failures of their lives. Loyalty to Loyalty is so rife with judgments, declarations and forgone conclusions that it feels less like a rock album than a kitchen-sink term paper attempting to solve all the world's problems in one fell swoop. The Kids 'musical gifts are undeniable; the scraping industrial guitars in "On the Night My Love Broke Through" recall Australian punk pioneers the Birthday Party, while the ferocious piano pounding of "Every Valley Is Not a Lake" echoes the Beatles '"Hey Bulldog." But the verbal grandstanding, stuttering rhythms and blasts of noise on their second album sometimes don't translate into cohesive songs. Cold War Kids's talk of community is fitfully persuasive, but it could be tempered with a little less self-absorption.