Mine Is Yours by Cold War Kids

Mine Is Yours, the third studio album from Long Beach's Cold War Kids, arrived on Downtown Records in January 2011, and it's the sound of a band deliberately stepping out of the shadows. After Loyalty to Loyalty, Behave Yourself and two long years of touring, Nathan Willett, Jonnie Russell, Matt Maust and Matt Aveiro spent three months working up new songs between Nashville and California, and handed the controls to Jacquire King, the producer who had helped carry Kings of Leon into the mainstream.

You can hear his hand. The murky, blues-soaked folk tales of the early records give way to wide, clean choruses and songs about the tangles of personal relationships, with Willett's yelp front and center on "Louder than Ever" and "Skip the Charades". Critics split over the makeover. It turned out to be Russell's last album with the band; he left for personal reasons.

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