The Killers - 'Day and Age' (Vertigo) Released 24/11/08

When Brandon Flowers offers the assertion that “since the Eighties, there hasn’t been smart pop music. Nirvana just killed it” not only is the irony palpable (after all, what were Nirvana if not amongst the smartest, most subversive pop bands of the Nineties?) but his antiquated, somewhat sheltered perspective on today’s music scene is left exposed. In Brandon’s world you imagine the likes of Timbaland, Girls Aloud and all the usual critic-friendly usual suspects have never existed; Britannia High-fixated morons litter the landscape, only to collapse in fear as over the dusty horizon emerge The Killers, pop music’s last great hope! In a time of such utter crisis there’s no room for reticence, and anything goes. If ‘Day & Age’ makes any sense - and it rarely does - then it’s in this context: as an album that isn’t afraid to do anything.

Although ‘Sam’s Town’ is now unfairly derided as a misstep it was nevertheless the record that cemented the Las Vegas quartet at their rightful place on the world’s biggest stages. When it worked, when the American-stadium influences gelled with the starry-eyed grandeur of ‘Hot Fuss’ (most notably on ‘When You Were Young’ and ‘Read My Mind’) it was spectacular. Although on paper ‘Day & Age’ is closer in spirit to their debut (thanks to the presence of producer Stuart Price, who makes everything sound a little too slick), the curtain-raiser ‘Losing Touch’ recalls the oft-mentioned Springsteen comparisons that surrounded the second album, in what sounds like a deliberate bridge between ‘Sam’s Town’ and today.

It’s the beginning of an extremely strong opening quarter, the lyrics “you made your way back home/you sold your soul” establishing a theme of redemption that finds the perfect accompaniment in a spiralling wall of percussion, only giving way at the last minute to a lone trumpet. First single ‘Human’ is initially indigestible, but get over the Eurovision-friendly introduction and the reassuring Killers traits are still there: synths weighted down with sadness, confusion at the heart of euphoria, insecurity and optimism skipping hand-in-hand. It’s fantastic, but a veritable timid flower of a track compared with ‘Spaceman’. Buoyed on a rallying cry that teeters on the edge of cheese it’s arguably one of only two moments on ‘Day & Age’ where the electro-wizardry of Price (Les Rythmes Digitales, Madonna’s brilliant ‘Confessions On A Dancefloor’) meets the songwriting of Flowers head-on. The pace is propulsive, the balance between catering for the dancefloor and Brandon’s fragile psyche quite perfect; it will slay the charts, and deservedly so.