Cold War Kids flex muscles at Wiltern (with bootleg)

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The power of the Cold War Kids’ music has always been its ability to wrap the frailties of the ill-starred characters in their three-minute novellas into a Tennessee Williams-like ball of emotion. The Long Beach quartet’s sweat-stained storytelling has raised the room temperature in small clubs and smoky bars, but putting that spare, wiry blues-punk in a big theater or on an outdoor stage has been an iffy proposition – it’s like balancing a bowling ball on a blade of grass.

The Kids supported the weight of the Wiltern Theatre on Friday night, providing 1 hour and 20 minutes of heavy lifting that not only revealed a grander scale to their vision but a broader appeal for their music.

||| Download: Bootleg of Cold War Kids Live at the Wiltern (112 MB)

The crowd at the sold-out show, which was co-presented by KROQ-FM, was not populated by many in the way of fedora-sporting indie snobs; these Cold War Kids’ fans were young and agitated and ready to party, which in this case meant bouncing along to the rhythms from bassist Matt Maust and drummer Matt Aveiro, twitching to the spastic licks from guitarists Jonnie Russell and Nathan Willett and shouting along with Willett’s yowling chrouses.

The show’s tent-rivival fervor was heightened by the foursome’s newly cinematic stage production – four panels spaced across the stage formed a tetraptych of arresting visuals conceived by bassist Maust (an artist whose work has been shown in galleries) and Vern Moen, a videographer who has worked the band. They ranged from slow-mo films to collages-on-steroids, and they worked well with the foursome’s paroxysms.

Cold War Kids played their new four-song EP “Behave Yourself” in its entirety – and the crowd was obviously already keen to the single “Audience of One” – and took their older favorites to a new level. “Hang Me Up to Dry” became a buoyant sing-along; “Something Is Not Right Me With Me” was a body-bumper; and if I didn’t know any better, the gospel-infused “Saint John” morphed into a rap song, at least from the body language of the crowd. The tender moments, as in the new song “Coffee Spoon,” weren’t sacrificed, either.

Cold War Kids have been assailed in some quarters as suburban white kids play-acting as old souls, but, as they showed on Friday night, at least they know what one is.