Sam's Town : The Killers : Review : Rolling Stone

Why, Killers? Why? It's the oldest story in the New Wave book: (1) Boys get famous wearing makeup and acting tarty to impress girls; (2) Boys wash off makeup and act sincere to impress boys; (3) It never works. Loads of the original New Wave bands fell into this trap, but the difference with the Killers is that we all thought they were too smart to take themselves seriously. On their smash 2004 debut, Hot Fuss, the Killers were dance-punk New Romantic glitz pimps, goosing David Bowie's "Queen Bitch" into their own ready-made classic, "Mr. Brightside." It was a perfect pop record, and a lot less superficial than it pretended to be. But on their second album, Sam's Town, the Las Vegas party boys ditch their cheerfully fake Bowie moves and try to get heavy by copying Bruce Springsteen. Yes, that means glockenspiel solos. Yes, it means anthems about the road and looking for America and girls named Mary. No, it's not a good move.

So this is the Killers in 1980s Springsteen-clone mode: better than Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers; not as good as John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band; about even with Billy Hixx and the New Breed. (That was Rob Lowe's band in St. Elmo's Fire, though the Killers have better fashion sense.) In the single "When You Were Young," Brandon Flowers blares about highways, heartaches, mountains, Jesus and the devil, and sprains his larynx trying to sell lines like "We're burning down the highway skyline/On the back of a hurricane." (Hurricanes don't burn, actually; check your copy of Neil Young's Guide to Weather Metaphors.) So why is it the single? Because it's the closest thing to a good song on the album.

All over Sam's Town, the Killers leave no pompous arena cliche untweaked in their quest to rewrite "Born to Run" - even though one of the reasons Springsteen's a genius is that he's never tried to rewrite "Born to Run" himself. On Hot Fuss, Flowers got boyish emotion out of his flat Gary Numan voice box, which is how he charmed his way through fantastic anthems like "All These Things That I've Done." But here, he strains for a high register he doesn't have and ends up with a screech. Yet even a more deft singer couldn't save bloated epics with I-swear-I'm-not-making-this-up titles like "Bling (Confessions of a King)" and "This River Is Wild." "My brother, he was born on the Fourth of July"? "I woke on the roadside/In the land of the free ride"? "Enterlude" and "Exitlude" frame the album with a vague hotel/casino theme ("We hope you enjoy your stay" - where are we, the Paradise Theater?), but the concept adds up to nothing except faux-Boss cliches already picked clean by Eighties never-weres from Lone Justice to John Eddie.

The Killers still show musical smarts and wit, as in the Hot Fuss-style chorus hooks of "For Reasons Unknown" and "Bones," where Flowers makes a welcome return to imitating Morrissey, even if the band takes that as a cue to crank up the synth horns. But they sounded a lot smarter playing it cool and a lot more soulful pretending to be cold-hearted, bleary-eyed gigolos. On Sam's Town they seem like they're trying to make a big statement, except they have nothing to say - and who thought a band as shrewd as the Killers would fall into such an obvious trap?