Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Cold War Kids :: "Hang Me Up To Dry"From Robbers & Cowards (Downtown; 2006)
Sometimes it’s okay to like only one track from a band; I don’t really need to listen to the rest of Robbers & Cowards again, but at the same time I don’t necessarily have to discount future efforts from Cold War Kids, for in “Hang Me Up to Dry” I have a token of what they can do when they use the same basic components that make up their other songs, just with better balance and impact.
On this track that superiority’s born of a rote but endearing purpose: knock out a modern blues rocker and, hey, R.I.P. Jeff Buckley. The extended lyrical metaphor is pretty empty yet effective, lead singer Nathan Willett spewing out lines of a visceral silliness suitable to a song threaded on stunted, incorrigible guitar riffs and frayed by brief, sloppy piano improvisations. “Now hang me out to dry / You’ve wrung me out too, too, too many times.” Probably the song’s narrator, who in the first verse seems rather content in his squalor, is tired of being put through the wringer by some controlling boo. Maybe he appreciates the cleansing intervention on the one hand but still just wants to get the whole fiasco over with; it’s wearing him out. Likely, pondering is pointless. Willett’s lithe tenor follows that klaxon electric line on the verses, soars up with it on the chorus, and as the little peripheral touches fall apart, the whole jam becomes a more temperate exercise in the sort of blank rock power wielded by The Stooges. Cold War Kids prove themselves capable of slick appeals to the fist-pumping unconscious.
Chet Betz :: 25 October 2006 |
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