"Dear Miss Lonelyhearts" by Cold War Kids

Cold War Kids
Dear Miss Lonelyhearts
[Downtown Records]

Taking inspiration from Nathanael West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts, in which an advice columnist absorbs and worries about the suffering of his own readers, the entire album aches with intensity and desperation that seems to hark back to the medium from which it takes so much inspiration from. Dripping with a phantom struggle of emotions, the ever-changing tempo from track to track and hasty lyrics seem as though the work of a storyteller rather than a songwriter.

It’s as much indie as it is an idiosyncratic mesh of pop and alt-dance, and rather than building a brand new genre around themselves and forging new lines,

they’ve gone back in the direction which made us fall

in love with them in the first place. Dear Miss Lonelyhearts falls gracefully back towards well-treaded roots.