Hold My Home is the fifth album from the indie rock band Cold War Kids. The Cold War Kids are best known for their 2007 debut album Robbers and Cowards, which critics praised for singer Nathan Willett’s great vocals and the album’s tone and instrumentals.

Robbers and Cowards sounds like a night after a lot of drinking. It’s rambling, with sudden shouting out of the blue, and several out of place piano parts. It’s basically an overall mess. Yet it’s this mess that makes the album complicated and good. The feeling of being lost coupled with the desperation of Willett’s powerful vocals make the album truly what critics call an indie masterpiece. However, the band has since struggled to maintain that sound, instead facing much criticism for suddenly altering their music over the past few years to be more rock based.

So where does this put Hold My Home, you might ask? Well, it’s certainly not Robbers and Cowards, and if you like that album, you probably won’t like Hold My Home as much. It’s more rock, and that’s what I like about it, as do many people.

If you want to like Hold My Home, you have to forget about Robbers and Cowards. The whole album is a lot less rambling. Instead it’s angry and grief filled.

In the album’s opening track “First,” Willett sings, “Night after night, bar after club… On the front lawn, sprinklers turned on; It’s not your house, where’d you go wrong; First you get hurt, then you feel sorry; Flying like a cannonball, falling to the earth; Heavy as a feather when, you hit the dirt.”

The whole album is like this. It’s angry, yet forgiving, like a final warning repeated over and over. It shows sympathy.

My favorite part of this album is that it slows down gradually, and the overall pacing in the album is great. One thing I especially hate in albums is when you go from listening to a fast-paced song to suddenly hearing a slow ballad. It kills the natural pacing and the mood of the album. The album should flow. I don’t want to listen to a random collection of singles. However, an album shouldn’t just settle into the same sound for too long a period as that would make it overly repetitive. There is a fine line between being overly repetitive and having a good flow. In my opinion, staying on this line is what differentiates the good albums from the great. Hold My Home does a good job of walking this line for the most part, leaning just barely towards repetitiveness.

The final few songs are especially slow, and they do a great job of showing off Willett’s vocals. It’s here where the album becomes excellent. The last two songs, “Harold Bloom” and “Hear My Baby Call,” are fantastic rock ballads that make the album memorable.

My favorite is “Hear My Baby Call” where, towards the end, a woman joins in to croon alongside Willett and helps create the perfect mourning tone to end the album.

It’s hard to find things wrong with this album, yet there is one small thing that prevents it from being a perfect 10. As much as I love the pace, the album leans a little too much towards repetitiveness. The hard rock tone gets a little overdone. The first few songs are great, yet some of the middle songs sort of blur together.

The biggest example of this blurring is the song “Hot Coals.” “Hot Coals” sounds good but is overly similar to the first two songs, “First” and “All This Could Be Yours,” and is thus forgettable. But this is the only instance of this problem and I generally stayed interested because of the album’s pacing.

The last thing I’d like to talk about with this album is its critical reception. This album received completely mixed reviews. Why is this? As mentioned above, this album is nothing like what people expect the Cold War Kids to sound like. It’s completely different from Robbers and Cowards. Yet I think it shows a great evolution in sound. It truly is a great album, and I believe it deserves a lot more attention. Check it out if you can on iTunes or Spotify. It’s worth the time.