Imploding the LP
I was just as excited as anyone to be greeted with “Caution”, the uplifting lead-off single from The Killers’ upcoming album. It effortlessly exuded the arid high-desert confidence found on some of the Las Vegas outfit’s previous work while belting out the counterintuitively anthemic story of a young girl escaping her hometown, and along the way it even paid lyrical homage to Paul Simon while leaning on the now-expected musical cornerstone of The Boss. What was not to love?
Other singles were dropped as Imploding the Mirage neared release, and they all had a similar swagger - more importantly, they all bopped when taken on their own. But the album’s coming-out party left something to be desired despite how good those early glimpses had been in the nearly Killers-less vacuum that existed before its arrival. This article isn’t strictly about Mirage though, so I’ll keep my criticism brief. Mirage is an album that has some good ideas but ultimately sails on the seas of goodwill the band has built with fans - it preaches to The Killers’ base and seems content with that as an outcome. Several times while listening I found myself surprised by an incongruence between the tone of the music when paired with the tone of the lyrics or vice versa - the album is altogether uneven in key ways. Mirage is, and I can’t stress this enough, not an LP made for repeated listens or one that offers any real challenges to the listener artistically.
Of course this is all only my opinion, but I find The Killers’ latest offering wears out its welcome quickly by providing a song cycle whose specialty seems to be diminishing returns.
In the lead-up to Mirage’s release, people everywhere happily jumped into the fray with their takes on the band and their past music. Watching some of this dialog transpire confirmed for me that the group’s first two albums are still the most beloved. Nearly any conversation evolves or devolves into an either/or proposition between Hot Fuss and Sam’s Town for the crown of Most Special or Most Impactful in The Killers catalog. Full disclosure: I can’t fully hate on this read of the situation - I am of a certain age where I saw these scruffy merrymakers unleash these two records that brought respectability back to mainstream New Wave and lent commercial credibility to Springsteen’s heart-on-sleeve small-town balladry.
But all that said, I’m here to offer another solution to the ongoing debate. What if Brandon Flowers and his rock-n-roll cabal’s best album…isn’t an album at all?
Sawdust is a rarities and B-sides compilation LP that arrived in 2007 about a year after Sam’s Town. In a tale as old as time, someone behind the scenes (whether in the band or with the label) mandated that a new tribute had to be offered to the adoring public, lest the band somehow be forgotten or their superpowers diluted in the wake of a very successful album. Luckily The Killers had no issues finding seventy minutes of music with which to fill up a project like this, and their audience reaped all the benefits.
The collection includes more than its fair share of great songs, but what is even more impressive is that it showcases the band with a notably more laissez faire approach. Here, The Killers aren’t straining for anything coherent with which to sustain a proper “album”; the songs are simply presented for consumption one-by-one, each on its own merits. We get the stunning Lou Reed guest spot on opener “Tranquilize”, three very high-quality covers (“Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”, “Shadowplay”, and “Romeo and Juliet”), reinterpretations of “Sam’s Town” and “Mr. Brightside”, and a host of other outright stellar tracks that benefit from not trying to be anything they aren’t (“Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll”, “Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf”, “Change Your Mind”, etc).
Let’s face it, a critical reading of history tells us that The Killers have ten or fifteen very good songs in them at nearly any given moment, but choosing the correct ones around which to construct an album has proven to be challenging at best, disappointing at worst. Sawdust is remarkable partly because no one is worried about it putting the band in some proverbial “conversation” about what new music is most relevant; there’s essentially no pressure here on what is in function little more than a stopgap release. I contend that all this works to the band’s advantage in significant ways. If we accept that the artists can make amazing songs, but also that they rarely cobble an album together that doesn’t stall out at the high end of “average”, then what could be a better showcase for them than an album-length project that is made up of individual works doled out on each of their own individual terms?
One of the most charming things about The Killers over time has been their affable, down home, big-brother-just-came-back-from-junior-year-at-university sense of perspective with regard to their status and success. What are they really if not a band we may have called “indie” under other circumstances but who has now decked itself out in rhinestones and designer chaps for an endless wee-hours rendezvous in the harsh glare of Vegas neon? They are showmen for the sake of being showmen in a way that harkens back to Nashville, MoTown, The Garden State, and the dreams of every small town kid in between.
When we see them in this light, a loose collection of tangential ephemera decked out in their signature melodramatic style becomes exactly the forum in which they can shine their brightest.
