Day & Age is full of ideas, instruments and hooks

The new album reverts back to when The Killers were young.

By Jordan Sargent

Published Dec. 9, 2008

The problem with The Killers' last album, the critical flop Sam's Town, wasn't that the band, four posh Vegas guys, attempted to make a canonical album about hard-life America. It was that they weren't able to wear the sheep's clothing very well.

The Killers have always been posers. Before the band started to take off (read: accumulate a budget), lead singer Brandon Flowers was a goofy, unassuming guy who looked about five years younger than he actually was. Now: feathers, moustaches, immaculate haircut, make-up etc.

But being posers is exactly what made The Killers great. The band's classic early singles — "Mr. Brightside," "Smile Like You Mean It," "Somebody Told Me" — constructed an image that was, if not fabricated, then at least endearing in its yearning for role-play. These dorky guys clearly imagined themselves as coked-up electro-poppers, misplaced in the 2000s from their true gig as openers for Duran Duran.

Of course, it all worked, because they had the songs to match the artifice — songs worthy of the fantastical image. Flowers never really said much, but he and his band dreamed up these maximalist and decadent glam songs and played them with platinum-worthy chops and four straight faces, even on back-half album cuts like "Change Your Mind" and "Midnight Show."

Day & Age sees the band reverting back to when they were young, taking themselves just as seriously as ever but reveling in their own ridiculousness. Where Sam's Town was hilariously overblown and overwrought, Day & Age is stuffed to the gills with ideas and instruments and hooks. Some of them are very good and others are not, but the result is an album that is fun and surprising, not nearly as good as their debut but one that certainly benefits from being written in its spirit.

In typical fashion, the best songs are the singles. The liquid disco guitars and bright synth pulse of "Human" (courtesy of producer and legendary house remixer Stuart Price) are only matched in glamour and greatness by the towering chorus, one that Flowers is able to take into other stratospheres within two seconds of opening his mouth.

"Spaceman" is speedier and punchier, with immediate backing chants that are so transparent in their desire for a stadium-crowd sing-along that they move directly past reprehensible into totally awesome. Again, the verses are a precursor to Flowers' spiraling and ascending chorus, one that keeps soaring higher every time it seems like it can't get any more massive.

Elsewhere, things are patchier, both in terms of quality and in terms of imagination. "Joy Ride," with its bongos, slippery guitar lines and some dude straight-up having the time of his life on the sax, is on one hand patently ridiculous and on the other basically incredible. "This is Your Life," built on backing vocals that might be an homage to "The Lion King," is the album's best ballad, and "I Can't Stay" and its Balearic posturing and cheesy dentist's office sax go over way better than they should.

The problems arise when The Killers get a little boring. "A Dustland Fairytale" aims to be epic but falls on its face, the meandering "Neon Tiger" doesn't live up to the promise of its song title and "Goodnight, Travel Well" is brooding, formless and bad.

Day & Age solves no problems for The Killers. It is decidedly hit-or-miss, and though packed with ideas, it flounders in places. What it does for us, though, is more important: It gives us four or five more songs for what will be the band's surely incredible greatest hits.