"I tried to call you collect..../Your friends are laughing 'cause nobody uses pay phones," barks Cold War Kids frontman Nathan Willett. The SoCal quartet's preference for the old and outmoded is all over their second album. Willett's vibrato-heavy tenor calls to mind Robert Plant, and the music starts with Seventies boogie and Sixties swamp rock and reaches back further, to the stormy desolation of Chicago blues and the rolling gospel rave-ups that shook storefront churches to their foundations. There are lots of indie rockers working this strain of Americana these days, but Cold War Kids attack their songs with unusual intensity (check out the stomping "Every Valley Is Not a Lake"), infusing even the most noirish, unsettling songs — fractured narratives about hipster bohemia ("Against Privacy") and suicide ("Golden Gate Jumpers") — with a feeling of enchantment. The lyric-writing is vivid and economical: "Every man I fall for drinks his coffee black/love and hate are tattooed on his knuckles/And my name is on his back," Willett sings. In Cold War Kids' anachronistic world, the scenery is sepia-toned, the guitars are swathed with reverb and caked in mud — and cellphones haven't been invented yet.