[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

“Hang Me Up to Dry” – Cold War Kids
(Words/music: Cold War Kids, available on Robbers & Cowards, Downtown/V2 2006)

Looking back at the ascendency of music blogs over the past few years, it’s somewhat startling how quickly their influence took hold.  Now, the network of the “big” music blogs tend to echo each other; one introduces a band and slowly everyone else catches on.  Some of these bands (Arcade Fire immediately comes to mind) rose from bloggers’ darlings to full-blown phenomenon, while others surfaced for a brief moment in the spotlight before stepping back to the blog circuit.  Cold War Kids is one of those bands for me – one that I kept reading about before hearing them.  I think they were well into the backlash by the time I finally heard “Hang Me Out to Dry” – maybe I was busy those few weeks, or maybe I missed that initial spark that set everyone off on them.  Regardless, my knowledge of the band begins and ends with “Hang Me Out to Dry” – something that should not be read as a condemnation of the song.  I really enjoy the song (more on that in a minute), yet I’m satisfied to stop there.  I’ve never listened to the rest of Robbers & Cowards and even when I’m looking for something new to explore, I have little interest to listen to the rest of the disc.  I think this is a product of how I discovered the song as almost an afterthought – I had read far too much about the band by the time I heard the song, and even though I liked the song, it didn’t seem worthy of all the fuss.

So the question is why “Hang Me Up to Dry” was a dead-end when my natural inclination is to follow up on a band when I like a song.  Specifically, I like how the song grinds against itself; that slow riff creates this specific menacing feel to the track, and vocalist Nathan Willett channels this sinister feeling in his vocals.  The entire song feels dramatic – from the dark, brooding riff to the way Willett twists every note, especially as he sings the chorus sounding half tormented, half ready to snap.  Perhaps it’s the drama that makes “Hang Me Up to Dry” enough for me.  The song is plenty, and when every other thing I read about the band was a meta-commentary about the band’s hype cycle, it’s hard for me to want to delve in deeper.  It’s too bad, because I can see elements in “Hang Me Out to Dry” that would make people go crazy about them in the first place.  Maybe this is the music blog’s double-edged sword - it’s capable of introducing us to many wonderful new bands, yet it’s also capable of making us sick of these bands before we actually hear them.

More on Cold War Kids: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm