[a]Cold War Kids[/a]’ 2006 debut ‘Robbers And Cowards’ may have been a perfectly inoffensive collection of palatable (albeit preachy) indie-rock, but Lord have mercy on them – here is an album so screamingly MOR it makes the bald dude from [a]The Fray[/a] look like [a]Pete Doherty[/a]. ‘Finally Begin’, ‘Skip The Charades’ and ‘Out Of The Wilderness’ are all so generic, it’s as though they clicked the ‘arena rock’ demo on GarageBand and buggered off for of tea. Any brief spates of individuality, such as the jangle-pop of ‘Broken Opportunities’, are soon asphyxiated in lubricious studio slime. ‘Mine Is Yours’? You can keep it, thanks.
Katherine Rodgers