The Killers – or just, irritatingly, Killers (make up your minds) – or the Safeway Strokes as I prefer to call them, have been peddling their U2-lite (yes, less abrasive than U2) indie ‘rock and roll’ for four (however many) albums too long now. Brandon Flowers is just so damn desperate to BE some Burroughsian hybrid of Joe Strummer and Robert Smith that he completely misses the point of real, deliberate isolationism. This is isolation as gimmick.
I remember Noam Chomsky saying something along the lines of: the problem isn’t that George Bush is a fundamentalist Christian, but do you really want someone like that running the world? This is the same problem I have with Flowers, Bono, Chris Martin, LL Cool J, Marcus Mumford (cod-Amish/Calvinist, presumably), etc…Christianity, like many beliefs, is a cancer, and the blind fundamentalism of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) is probably the most malignant strain I can think of. It’s not the fraudulent, manipulative belief that is the problem, but do I really want to spend time on or with the person who made the ‘music’ I’m listening to? Well, if the music is any good, sure…
But it’s not. It’s an overtly stylised hotch-potch of 80s nostalgia, tunes as a dreary memory, repetetive choruses which hope they are hypnotic, but in fact are annoying, a constant, narcissistic nerviness which is more Lady G*ga than Talking Heads, and an over-riding feeling of ‘Rebellion’ (Sponsored by Gap). Brandon Flowers will I imagine never go wanting because of his businesslike, canny understanding that ‘yearning’ is cultural currency (Keane, Travis, The fucking Feeling), and Sunday shoppers will put their last abortion (‘Battle Born’ if I remember correctly; the most banal, sub U2 (again)/Kings Of Leon-esque atrocity I can remember hearing in a long while), before dragging themselves home to their miserable, pointless, photocopied version of life.
