Hold My Home CD

Between their strong comeback with Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, the promising side project French Style Furs, and Hold My Home, Cold War Kids had a creative rebirth in the mid-2010s.  Recorded at their own studio, the band's fifth album is charged with an intimacy and intensity that began returning to their music with Lonelyhearts.  Hold My Home is even more assertive than that album, with an opening trio of songs that rank among Cold War Kids' finest. They own their anthemic power on the brash "All This Could Be Yours" and "First," even though the song's rousing stomps and claps are at odds with Nathan Willett's uncertainty.  Willett and company play with this ambivalence even more expertly on "Hot Coals," where he grapples with masculinity and emotions via pithy words ("What ever happened to the strong, silent type?") and punchy sounds, and later on the soulful tug-of-war between love and freedom "Go Quietly."  The rest of Hold My Home is nearly as strong, with Cold War Kids accomplishing