Sam's Town, The Killers

For some reason, known only to them, The Killers have decided they want to be an important rock band making important music. Not being omnipresent, neither you nor I have anyway of knowing when this happened, but I'm guessing it was after the surprise success of 2004's Hot Fuss that Brandon Flowers and company knew it was their fate to be mentioned among the pantheon of rock greats. And like a boy who misreads a kind girl's smile, they plunge headfirst into trouble. Unfortunately for The Killers and their new album Sam's Town, important music can very often be boring and unloved music. All of which Sam's Town, save for some tracks on the first half, is destined to be.

Unimportant music, like Hot Fuss, can be fiercely loved. I adored Hot Fuss. More than just a New Wave knock-off, an unfair pegging it received from far to many jaded critics who still miss Joy Division, it was a great display of catchy hooks in pop songs so full of life they stuck with you like the taste of really good candy. The music was candy. Unimportant, disposable candy shipped straight from Las Vegas; that's what made it so damn good. The unimportant Hot Fuss made The Killers an important band, and I eagerly awaited Sam's Town. Which is too bad for me, since Sam's Town is a track by track record of The Killers abandoning everything great about Hot Fuss.

Now, it's impossible to talk about this record without talking about Bruce Springsteen - thank you Brandon Flowers - as the very prolific frontman told anyone who would listen how 'influenced' he was by The Boss, and how he planned to make the next Killers album one of the best albums of the last twenty years(if you are reading this twenty years in the future, and this prediction has come true, I don't know what else is going on in the world but I'll bet you envy the dead).

This is a very average, but not horrible, album. It only ends in disaster, like a bad relationship or a skateboarder pulling of some really good tricks right before hitting a guardrail, flipping over and falling down the kind of wide concrete stairs that only downtown office buildings seem to have, and breaking both his legs. Except in this case, you can hear every bone breaking very clearly. With some reverb and synthesizers.

The first few tracks of Sam's Town still have some of the energy of songs like Somebody Told Me. The title track itself is pretty good, and For Reasons Unkown could have been a b-side on Hot Fuss. It's around Uncle Jonny, the seventh track, that everything begins to fall apart(spelling Jonny without the h served as a warning, I suppose). Listening to Jonny, I could hear it begging, screaming for a hook, a better melody, something, anything to rescue it from it's own mediocrity. The band desperately tries to sound different; to sound like they grew up in working class New Jersey.

Up to this point, the only sign of The Boss that I could detect was in the lyrics. And when you are listening to a Killers song, the last thing you should worry about are the lyrics. As long as they don't get in the way, who cares what Brandon is singing about? Mr. Brightside could have been an ode to Chernobyl and no one would have noticed or cared. Lyrics, or rather 'deep' lyrics, are not Flower's strength. So when he attempts to write something inspired by Springsteen, we get something that sounds like someone trying to write something inspired by Springsteen. Although listening to the dichotomy of a slightly evolved, but still New Wave sounding Killers against lyrics straight out of a watered-down Born To Run was a little weird, it was still enjoyable and definitely catchy.

Listening to The Killers chaotic and confused attempt at a Springsteen sound, however, is when you begin to hear the bones break. Especially on the next track, Bones, one of the most boring and creepy songs I've heard all year. I don't know what kind of women Flowers plans to seduce with lines about putting bones on bones, but I'll bet Eric Roberts is still stealing them.

After Bones there are some songs that manage a decent imitation of a Springsteen record, but they still fail. I'm sorry no one had the balls to tell Flowers this, but his vocals are not suited at all for that type of rock. Nearly breathless vocals sound very good when you are backed by synth-guitar laden music, but when those elements are layered so densely with a more earthy sound, well, you get the drowned out and challenged singing found throughout the second half of Sam's Town.

Okay, now I feel bad for ripping this album. I really enjoyed the first few songs, and one song in the second half, My Lists, actually does a decent job of Flower's vision. Plus, on the so silly it's fun Exitlude, the band sounds genuinely sad to see you go. So, it should be noted(and it will be, to the dismay of many people who genuinely hate fun, unimportant music) that this isn't the death toll of The Killers by any stretch. Hopefully, they will look at what worked and what didn't and go from there for their next effort. I just hope the band remembers the importance of being unimportant.