I think I’m probably right in saying that music critics are supposed to begin a review from a relatively nonpartisan perspective. I can also tell you right now that, given that requirement, I’m probably not qualified to write this review. There are very few bands that inspire in me the affection necessary to make me volunteer myself for extra writing during Thanksgiving Break; my feelings for the Killers are something like love.
That being said, I am forever a harsh music critic; I won’t lie about what I hear but I would rather drop this article than give one of my favorite bands a bad rap. That you’re reading this right now bodes well.
To be honest — and I admit that this contradicts my earlier claim of bias in favor of the band — I wasn’t sure what to expect out of The Killers’ fourth full album, Day & Age. Their last compilation release, Sawdust, made me a little nervous; of its 17 tracks, the two songs that excited me more than most of the others were actually covers of a song by the Dire Straits and a song made famous by Kenny Rogers. Sawdust was one of those albums that ended up in my CD player quite a bit only so that I could skip through all but about seven songs.
When listening to their new LP, Day & Age, however, the seek button does not look nearly as attractive.
Even so, Day & Age has one notable characteristic in common with the Killers’ other three albums (particularly their second project, Sam’s Town): The album takes several listens to get from “This is nice” to “This is love.” But once you get to that point, it sticks.
The Killers’ new album is difficult to analyze in relation to the band’s other albums; however, it both incorporates and moves beyond the band’s older works. Just like its predecessors, Day & Age is in itself an epic battle between a group of young musicians wanting to push and recreate their boundaries and a band trying not to lose its niche in the contemporary music scene. The group makes a shift from the minor keys that dominate earlier albums to the more cheerful, optimistic major keys that prevail in the new album. The band also continues to experiment with orchestra and synthesized sounds — which appear at their best in “Human” and “This Is Your Life” — in contrast to heavy past reliance on distorted electric guitar. Even steel drums make their appearance in the surprisingly (considering the title) bouncy track “I Can’t Stay.”
To put it in the form of an analogy, Day & Age is to The Killers as Rubber Soul is to The Beatles — a stepping stone on the path to what I’m counting on to be musical perfection.
Yet even when The Killers discover something new, they don’t give up the techniques that have already brought them victory.
Behind The Killers’ success, ironically, is their stubborn refusal to yield to listeners’ expectations. That’s not to say they abandon their own style; when listening to The Killers, you should be ready, to use a cliché, to “expect the unexpected.” Unlike, for example, Jessica Simpson’s most recent album, Brandon Flowers’ vocals perfectly evade almost any attempt to foretell where his harmony is headed.
Lyrics are yet another element of The Killers’ music that continues to be predictably unpredictable, with lyrics of songs such as “Spaceman” teetering between poetry and nonsense: “My global position systems are vocally addressed / They say the Nile used to run from East to West.” Yet Flowers delivers his lines with such conviction that the listener can’t help but believe that he knows something we don’t. In this sense, The Killers’ new album, Day & Age, brings listeners into a sort of dreamland where the normally bizarre sounds bizarrely normal.
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