From the title of the album onwards, Mine is Yours subjects its listeners to cliché after cliché, numbing the dynamic energy that one might expect from the Cold War Kids with bland conventionality. 

The title track is the strongest track, but that’s not saying much. The whole song is so blatant in its unoriginality that it becomes something of a comfort: perhaps you will hear it at Applebees with your uncle 10 years from now and remember the good old 2010’s. Later, after trying and failing to channel the tightly controlled aggression of the Strokes in “Louder is Better” and the ska aesthetics of Vampire Weekend in “Royal Blue,” the band finally sets its sights more appropriately on Train in the song “Flying Upside Down” — and that’s still a stretch. The problem with this album is that the Cold War Kids have abandoned what made them such a gem in the first place: the unpredictable ways in which dazzling riffs, such as in “Hang Me Up to Dry,” emerge from heart-pounding rhythms and the lyrics whose poetry lingers long after the songs are over. On this album, however, many of the rhythms sound as though they were produced by the “Rock and Roll Beat” button on a Yamaha keyboard gifted to you at your Bar Mitzvah circa 2001. Correspondingly, their lyrics are full of the sort of brilliance that you would encounter going through your angsty diary from the same year. From “Sensitive Kid” to “Skip the Charades” one could be forgiven for thinking they have encountered the liner notes of Blink 182’s foray into adult alternative. Everything about this album sounds too streamlined and prepackaged.  For a group known for their evangelical roots and Christian subtexts, they would have done better to have tried to channel Creed. 

C-