After South by Southwest, the Cold War Kids fill clubs from Austin to D.C.
By Emily Hawkins
Photography by Graham Webster
Thursday April 12, 2007
While the characters who play in the stories sung by the Cold War Kids—a repentant alcoholic father, a condemned prisoner, a disgruntled Christian who steals from the church coffer—may be common protagonists in the garage rock scene, the way that these guys write and play the music to bring these characters to life is anything but typical. And whether it’s because of the characters’ tragic circumstances, lead singer Nathan Willet’s fetching, strangled high tenor, the jarring background of barroom piano, post-punk guitar, and stomp-drums, or some combination of those things, the Cold War Kids are selling out venues all over the country since they started touring with Tokyo Police Club in January.
The sold out show on March 28 at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., was no exception. The Kids opened with “We Used to Vacation,” a first-person sketch about a wretched alcoholic father and his failed attempts at repentance. Right on cue, in a repeat of their performance at South By Southwest (SXSW) two weeks earlier in Austin, TX, the crowd surged along with the shifting tempo in enthusiastic recognition.The Kids’ trick is elevating mundane everyday annoyances to the level of universal struggles by telling their stories with equal intensity and compassion. With every urgent verse of every droning storyline, the band’s charisma becomes more infectious. Like Willet, lead guitarist Jonnie Russell, bassist Matt Maust, and drummer Matt Aveiro tackle each song with a near-religious passion. So many bands at South by Southwest filled the venues they played, but only a handful truly owned the room the way the Kids did in both Austin and Washington. It’s their deep investment in the experience that has made their live shows so popular, and that may be no accident: three of the four Kids met at Biola University, an evangelical college in Southern California.
“Saint John,” a song about a guy on death row for killing his sister’s would-be rapist with a brick to the face, has an old fashioned Christian tent revival feel, but with the band singing together at the top of their lungs. Its lyrics touch on religion directly, but where the audience really gets blessed is in the experience of the live performance. At both SXSW and the 9:30 Club, the Kids called up all of the members of their opening bands, for a truly frenetic rendition of the song, a cacophony of makeshift wine bottle drumbeats, cymbals, additional vocals, even bass from a metal trashcan lid. The 10-plus extra musicians turned the stage into a circus, dancing around the more stationary of the Cold War Kids while Willet sang out, “Another suppertime in the hole. Shamed my family. Shamed my home.”
While the kids don’t push any overt political messages, they certainly have some pretty strong moral views, especially when it comes to religion. “Passing the Hat,” a raw narrative about the relative sin of stealing from church collection is filled with unbridled disdain for blind faith in a corrupt church. “I reach for the hat and take all the cash and slide it into my ragged coat sleeve / And leave in its place a note to explain / All of the reasons the spirit has led me to leave / If there was a worthy cause for to give to May I be so bold as to say / The givers not knowing where their money’s going / Is as sinful as throwing away.” This kind of statement isn’t lost on their audience, the majority of who fall into the “millennial” generation: a group that is both progressive and, according to a poll by Young Voter Strategies, especially spiritual.
At SXSW, the Kids wowed their audience when they called up former tour mates Elvis Perkins in Dearland for a rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” Whether they intended the cover as a political statement or just one more reference to the raw struggles of real and imagined lives, there was no question that at the end of the set, their audience walked away believers.
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