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Cold War Kids
"Honesty is never lost in translation. - D. Brown"
Location: Long Beach, CA
Website: http://www.coldwarkids.com
Bio: Cold War Kids means International Blues. We began in August 2004 with friends, jangly guitar, hand claps, and a Harmony amp in a storage room ... (more)
atop Mulberry Street restaurant in downtown Fullerton, CA.
For the first practices, having instruments was secondary to stomping and chanting; Clanging on heat pipes, thumping on plywood walls. Hollering into tape recorders. Slipping and swaying into alleyways and juke joints of yesteryear. Tapping in to the American dustbowl and British maritime.
On the restaurant's roof the sound and feeling was cultivated and burned, built and hallowed out, painted and stripped to the primer.
Almost three years have passed and we haven't let up since the starting gun fired. The album Robbers and Cowards was released in the US in October 2006 on Downtown and the rest of the world in February 2007 on V2.
Why even have apartments? We often ask ourselves as we have toured with the vim of a family reunion brawl across the US, UK, Europe, Australia and Japan.
Cold War Kids strive to make honest songs about human experience in orchards and hotel rooms, laundromats and churches, sea ports and school halls. We love the songs of Dylan, Nina Simone, and the Velvet Underground and make our own, which we like to think, are pretty original.
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June 25 2008
Cold War Kids! New Album! Tour! Video teaser!
Cold War Kids will be releasing their much-anticipated, to be named, second album on September 23.
Enjoy this video teaser with a song from the new album and footage of the recording process
May 9 2008
Cold War Kids - Maxin' and Relaxin' at Coachella with Spin Mag
Check out Spin's video interview with Matt Aviero and Nate Willet of Cold War Kids fame. Learn about pressing issues of the day, including Nate's new aerodynamic buzzcut and their upcoming second full-length album!
And, while we're at it, here are some photos of Cold War Kid's show later that day...
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February 7 2008
What It Is: What It Is Available Now
Matt Maust of Cold War Kids has been pretty busy lately. And today is the day it all comes together. Maust has just finished work on a collaboration with good friend and extraordinary writer, Paul G. Maziar. In What It Is: What It Is, Maust showcases his exceptional ability to capture and convey pieces of his world exactly as he sees and experiences them. His work in What It Is: What It Is is, quite simply, prodigal.
It’s not poetry, it’s not prose...what is it: what is it? With What It Is: What It Is, Cold War Kids bassist and visual artist Maust and wordsmith Maziar have succeeded in making a book that’s less of a book and more of a guided tour through places they’ve been, both actual and abstract. With prose poems about taking deep breaths from our collective unconscious and making exhalations of cold smoke into thin air, and photo-collage images of cities, faces, skies and subways, the work suggests a fractured postmodern world viewed through nostalgic eyes and voiced by a warm, familiar tongue that still sounds unique. -Filter Magazine
What It Is: What It Is is available now directly from the publisher, Write Bloody. It'll hit stores in the near future.
On Wednesday, February 13 at 8:00 pm, you're all invited to the What It Is: What It Is Release Soirée at Sound Fix Lounge (Beford and N. 11th in Williamsburg). It's FREE and will feature a reading by Paul G. Maziar as well as live performances by Chase Pagan and Matty Charles.
Also, be sure to visit Cold War Kids @ RCRD LBL to download The Mulberry Street EP.
December 14 2007
DOWNLOAD: Final installment of Cold War Kids' rare Mulberry Street EP
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and this is the last installment of our free Cold War Kids rare EP giveaway. The two last songs on their Mulberry Street EP, "In Harmony In Silver" and "Don't Let Your Love Grow Away (From Me) continue the urban Americana sound the band have perfected over the years. Take a listen below, and while you're at it download the rest of the EP if you missed out.
Download: Cold War Kids - In Harmony In Silver
Download: Cold War Kids - Don't Let You Love Grow Away (From Me)
And here are the first four tracks off the EP:
Download: Cold War Kids - Heavy Boots
Download: Cold War Kids - The Soloist in the Living Room
December 12 2007
Rare Mulberry Street EP available exclusively on RCRD LBL
Cold War Kids recorded three 6 song EPs before releasing Robbers & Cowards. The first of the three EPs is called Mulberry Street. It was recorded in a day in M. Wignall's garage/studio for some design job favors from Maust and sixty bucks. In between takes, Wignall would play an album over the speakers, like Iggy Pop's Lust For Life or Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, and go on long rants, pointing out sounds and talking about how good these musicians were and how we would be lucky if in ten years we could play a song anywhere near this good. We thought "Who cares! We just want to record our songs for us!" Then he showed us how to record vocals while he went to mow the lawn.
-Nathan Willett, Cold War Kids.
That's right, you guessed it. All this week we here at Downtown will be giving away the Mulberry Street EP for free on our RCRD LBL blog. That's six super-rare CWK tracks to lead up to you Christmas vacation (when you'll doubtlessly be in need for some good tunes).
Obviously, CWK have come a long way from recording Mulberry Street in 2005, playing venues all over the world and releasing their acclaimed Robbers & Cowards LP. Think of this as a special treat for uber-fans, a trip into what it was like to be part of what would become CWK as we know it, at the conception of the group. Or, to put it another way, think of this as their proto-Basement Tapes.
The first two tracks we're offering for download are "Heavy Boots" and "The Soloist in the Living Room", and even though they're early tracks, the band's strong aesthetic of urban Americana (think Tom Petty, Tom Waits, etc) was already strong.
Download the tunes below and stayed tuned tomorrow and Friday for the rest of the EP. Enjoy!
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