Good Weather For Airstrikes

Cold War Kids, the best new American band of 2006, are set to break into the public awareness with their debut album, Robbers & Cowards, out on October 10th on Downtown Records. In equally exciting news, they’ve also shot and released their first music video. The video is for “Hang Me Up To Dry”, one of the many elite tracks on this year’s Up In Rags EP, and was shot at a California middle school Battle of the Bands, which the group was invited to by a friend who worked for the school to show the kids how a professional band put on on a performance. Shots of the middle schoolers jumping around to the music intercut with the band’s jubilant performance footage makes for a perfect, cost-efficient music video debut, in keeping with the Kids’ incredibly endearing DIY aesthetic. Here’s what the band had to say about the video in an excerpt from their website:

“Last thursday we played a mid-day show that you probably did not attend. It was at Rancho Starbuck Middle School in Whittier at a Battle of the Bands contest. Do 12 year old kids really have rock bands? This was the question we asked until we saw Metallic Tigers do their covers of Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and Rage “Killing in the name Of” (instrumental with shredding guitar solos). And The Lawsuits, with their rendition of the Ramones “I Don’t Care,” (they really did not). These kids could have fit right in at CBGB’s 30 years ago with their wild hair and fingerless black glove mic styles. We played a 5 song set engulfed by 200 pre-teens screaming and jumping the whole time, and because we knew you wouldn’t believe it, we got the whole thing on film and are going to use it to make a video for our song “Hang Me Up To Dry.”

Video: “Hang Me Up To Dry” - Cold War Kids
Director: Cold War Kids
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the group have also announced the details of their upcoming debut LP, Robbers & Cowards. It’ll be released through Downtown on October 10th and culls tracks from the bands three EP releases plus two new ones, “Passing The Hat” and “God, Make Up Your Mind”. The band re-recorded “most of the songs on the EP’s in the way that [they[ would’ve liked to originally record them had [they] the time” Peep the album cover and tracklist below; linked files lead to the re-recorded album versions of the tracks, which I received on the four-track promo from Downtown. All songs are unmixed and unmastered.

Robbers & Cowards:
01. We Used To Vacation
02. Hang Me Up To Dry ((highly recommended))
03. Tell Me In The Morning
04. Hair Down
05. Passing The Hat
06. Saint John
07. Robbers
08. Hospital Beds ((highly recommended))
09. Pregnant
10. Red Wine, Success!
11. God, Make Up Your Mind
12. Rubidoux

ELSEWHERE:
Noise For Toaster has got a pretty sweet exclusive up, Ben Folds covering “Such Great Heights”, the original of which is, y’know, a pretty good song I guess.

Ooh.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 5:08 am and is filed under Music Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.