Cold War Kids bring energy, angst to songs

The screen hanging behind Cold War Kids at the Wiltern on Friday night read “100 Years of Solitude yet, Only 12 Yrs. Old!,” a fittingly skewed description of the Long Beach band’s ambitious musical energy and the dysfunctional characters that populate its songs.

Revving things up with the hard twang of “Don’t Let Your Love Grow Away From Me,” the Kids quickly asserted a singular sense of purpose before a fervidly into-it, packed house of fans. The group’s bold urgency revealed high aims in their songs’ structure, dynamics and pacing and combined with a breathtaking confidence for a band still so relatively new to the large-venue circuit.

They are not thrashers, not by a country mile. Yet you might call Cold War Kids’ stuff cinematic punk, taking cues from the temperamental atmospherics of Radiohead but warmed way up with Velvety drum smacks and a darkish cabaret-honky-tonk vibe aided considerably by charismatic singer Nathan Willett’s barrelhouse piano pumping.

“Robbers” and “Passing the Hat” and other stories of crumbling families, decaying moralities, corrupt religions or sheer mental survival were delivered with a sardonic fervor laced in a meaty minor-key majesty by a supremely taut and intelligent young band whose players interestingly often took turns completely dropping out of the mix, as if the overall mood of each piece was being painted from a broad palette. Only the typical mushy bass sound of the Wiltern detracted from the set’s ultimately mesmerizing power.

Revealing a grandeur of expression while neatly skirting the hectoring grandiosity of your average emo crew, Cold War Kids’ anthems take big musical risks and offer a paradoxical near-campy melodrama, wisely asserting, in both Willett’s deeply felt lyrics and in the band’s moodily mordant framing, that a bit of the overbaked is inherent in the modern-rock form. The band’s ability to assay its material with such buoyant assurance is a tribute to their highly imaginative and solid songwriting.

Rooted in the beefy angst of Gang of Four, openers We Barbarians’ bellowed vocals and hard-strumming guitar made an insistent and persuasively aggressive noise.