Cold War Kids at Pearl Street

Cold War Kids performed an excellent show Saturday night at Pearl Street in Northampton. Here's my review, which runs Monday in The Courant:

It’s awe-inspiring to see a band in peak form on stage, and Cold War Kids was certainly that Saturday night at Pearl Street in Northampton.

Months of playing together on the road has forged the Fullerton, Calif., group into a lean, tight musical unit that performs as if each of its four members is hooked into one surging electrical current.

From the opening notes of Blind Willie Johnson's “It's Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” reworked into a stark piano ballad to start the show, the band seemed to exist in a space where its music became a vital life force pouring energy into the vocal crowd, which sent it flowing right back to the band.

Along with a few covers, the hour-long set comprised tunes from Cold War Kids’ 2006 full-length debut, “Robbers and Cowards,” an album that blends old blues, country and soul music into a distinctive blend of rock ’n’ roll.

Singer Nathan Willett started the set on piano, banging out chords and singing in his sinewy voice on the alcoholic’s lament “We Used to Vacation.” Guitarist Jonnie Russell weaved and lurched around the stage, propelled by the stinging single note guitar lines he played to fill in the spaces around the piano. Sometimes, he and bassist Matthew Maust would step up to one another and almost lean on the other’s shoulder, before the music pulled them apart again.

Willett switched to guitar for “Rubidoux,” and he and Russell stirred up churning noise between verses over relentless, spot-on drumming from Matt Aveiro. The dark loping bassline of “Hang Me Up to Dry” framed Willett’s yelping vocals, and the whole thing gave way to a riot of percussion on “Saint John” as members of the two opening bands joined Cold War Kids to shake maracas and help belt out the chorus.

A mournful cover of Tom Waits’ “Dirt in the Ground” segued into the Kids’ “Hospital Beds,” and Willett played hymnal chords on piano as he sang about the friendship by circumstance of two old men spending their last days together.

Aveiro owned “Quiet Please,” his precise drumming pulling musical lines out of the other band members the way a magnet attracts iron filings. It was the last song of the set, though the band returned with a soulful cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” before ending with their own homage to the sound of ’60s rock ’n’ roll, “Hair Down.”

Canadian garage-rock band Tokyo Police Club was on before Cold War Kids, playing a 25-minute set of raw, rhythmic songs. San Diego’s Delta Spirit opened the show.