A band with survival skills

Back in July, the Long Beach-based soul-punk quartet Cold War Kids played a semi-secret show at R Bar, a windowless, nautically themed club in Koreatown. The young and besotted crowd climbed over tables, chairs and the bar in hopes of getting a better view of the band bobbing on the floor. Singer Nathan Willett held court with righteous wails, while behind him bassist Matt Maust, drummer Matthew Aveiro and guitarist Jonathan Russell prowled the floor as if looking for a fistfight. They closed the night with "Saint John," a Muddy Waters-meets-Ian MacKaye vamp about a racially charged brawl.

Cold War Kids, which earned its stripes on the Silver Lake residency circuit, had long since graduated to Wiltern-sized theaters, a deal with white-hot Atlantic-affiliated indie label Downtown Records and album sales of its 2006 debut "Robbers & Cowards" in the low six figures. But it makes sense that in advance of its much-awaited follow-up, "Loyalty to Loyalty," out Tuesday, the band would return to the kind of scene where it honed a sound that tries to understand the present by digging up the imagery of the past.

The group took plenty of hits since rising to a national stage, not least an unexpected flurry of criticism over some members' Christian upbringings that, in certain taste-making Internet circles, seemed like a strike against four white kids in the L.A. orbit. But Willett has an apt word for the way history seeps into his songwriting today -- "Cryptomnesia," the title of the last track on "Loyalty."

"I read about cryptomnesia in a case where Vladimir Nabokov was accused of plagiarizing different parts of 'Lolita' from a book published 30 years before," Willett said. "If he'd been taken to court, the loophole was cryptomnesia, that you can have things slip into memory and not be held responsible."

In a lot of ways, Willett is the quintessential indie-rock frontman of 2008. He's lanky, freckled and adorned with both Harry Potter-ish round eyeglasses and colorful tattoos. Conversations with him are rife with literary allusions and references to artists from decades past, and in his newer songs he has a vogue penchant for singing in first person as characters unlike himself.