Sam’s Town: Most disappointing discof the year

I am one of those music listeners who really dug the Killers‘ first CD, Hot Fuss.

The singles — in particular, “Somebody Told Me” — were both edgy and accessible and the rest of the disc had a nice retro vibe that reminded me of my early 20s, when WRSU (Rutgers) and WPRB (Princeton) were alternating on my car radio. The mix or guitar and synthesizer — and Brandon Flowers’ voice — made for as strong a debut as was released in 2004.

Fast forward two years to the release of Sam’s Town, the Las Vegas band’s newest, and that thrill of finding something new has given way to the worst kind of sophomore slump. While most second discs fail because they try too hard to recreate the vibe of their predecessor, Sam’s Town collapses under the weight of an unearned pretension.

This is a serious record — or it tries to be — or maybe it isn’t. It is hard to tell. Glimpses of the band’s first disc sneak through (On “This River is Wild,” for isntance), but mostly this is an album that suffocates under its own weight, an album that attempts to speak in the serious voices of U2 and Bruce Springsteen, that appropriates the stadium-ready sound that U2 has perfected but manages to be as empty as a fading balloon.

Stephen Thomas Erlwhine, on allmusic, explains it a whole lot better than I do:

Every time they try to dig deeper on Sam’s Town — when they bookend the album with “enterlude” and “exitlude,” when Flowers mixes his young-hearts-on-the-run metaphors, when they graft Queen choirs and Bowie baritones onto bridges of songs — they just prove how monumentally silly and shallow they are. Which isn’t necessarily the same thing as bad, however. True, this album has little of the pop hooks of “Mr. Brightside,” but in its own misguided way, it’s utterly unique. Yes, it’s cobbled together from elements shamelessly stolen from Springsteen, U2, Echo
& the Bunnymen, Bowie, Queen, Duran Duran, and New Order, but nobody on earth would have thought of throwing these heroes of 1985 together, because they would have instinctively known that it wouldn’t work. But not the Killers! They didn’t let anything stop their monumental misconception; they were able to indulge to their hearts’ content — even hiring U2/Depeche Mode producers Alan Moulder and Flood
to help construct their monstrosity, which gives their half-baked ideas a grandeur to which they aspire but don’t deserve. But even if the music doesn’t really work, it’s hard not to listen to it in slack-jawed wonderment, since there’s never been a record quite like it — it’s nothing but wrong-headed dreams, it’s all pomp but no glamour, it’s clichés sung as if they were myths. Every time it tries to get real, it only winds up sounding fake, which means it’s the quintessential Vegas rock album from the quintessential Vegas rock band.

And it is why it is the year’s most disappointing disc. At least so far.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet