The Killers - Wonderful Wonderful

The Guardian 80

(Island)

Recent departures from the Killers’ touring lineup have led Brandon Flowers to steer the ship through personal and global storms. On the band’s first album for five years, the frontman sounds as if he is howling in the face of an oncoming hurricane of mid-career panic, cheating senators and “fake news”. Guitars rage, electronic noises shriek. The Calling and the defiantly swaggering The Man come armed with a new funk chassis. However, beneath the epic gloss, vulnerability fires their best songs in a decade. The keyboard-driven, poppy Tyson vs Douglas positions Flowers as a fading champion. Rut and the title track channel his wife’s battles with PTSD. Then, Brian Eno co-write Some Kind of Love finds the Killers at their most beautifully ethereal. Finally, Have All the Songs Been Written? (a title knowingly suggested by Bono) finds Flowers confronting self-doubt to emerge as a latter-day Roy Orbison. This is certainly big music, which is all the better for its more intimate, touching soul.

Pitchfork 63

With the Killers, greatness and ridiculousness go hand in hand. Their fifth album contains a little of both.

Drowned In Sound 60

From the opening smokey trumpet of Wonderful Wonderful, it is clear that the band is same same but different. The production throughout remains sparklingly polished, and no stop goes unpulled (Woody Harrelson is even inexplicably present for a spoken intro to ‘The Calling’). The services of Jacknife Lee have been recruited, and there is more than a passing similarity in the titular track to his most famous charges, U2. But the difference lies in their sound, which creates a threatening landscape through Mark Stoermer’s constantly lurking bass. It is followed by lead single, ‘The Man’, which catapults us into an entirely different direction into strutting disco. It is shamelessly, absurdly camp, but also somehow brilliantly entertaining. Flowers uses falsetto, shimmering synths, dense backing vocals, even a key change: this is Blitzkrieg Pop.

The other main single, ‘Run For Cover’ makes a welcome returns to The Killers' musical roots, focusing on their failsafe strengths of guitar riffs and a relentless pace. Whether it is the full-throttled delivery or the catchy hooks, the song makes you excuse the at times laughably clunky lyrics (“What have gathered to your progenitors/Are your excuses any better than your senator’s?”; “What are you waiting for, a kiss or an apology?/You think by now you’d have an A in toxicology”; even a reference to “Fake News”) – nobody will mind while singing along at a packed concert.

But we knew that a new album would have a couple of hits to freshen up their live repertoire. The opening four tracks of the top-heavy Battleborn provided exactly this, before the wheels spectacularly fell off in the record’s forgettable second half. Musically, the album avoids such stagnation by playing around with different genres throughout, from the soothing dreampop of standout ‘Some Kind of Love’ to the rough electric snarl of ‘The Calling’.

And rather than sticking to their faux-Americana tropes of turnpikes and dirt-tracks, apart from one self-aware reference to Springsteen, the lyrics look inwards to explore more interesting areas. The sentimental crux of the album is ‘The Rut’, which, with all its mellow vulnerability, is cleverly juxtaposed after the cocksure swagger of ‘The Man’. Written as a heartfelt symbol of support documenting his wife’s PTSD and his own struggle in trying to support her (“I’ve done my best defending but the punches are starting to land/I’m sliding into something you won’t understand”), it is a brave turn of honest introspection and rousing empowerment. At times, however, it lacks the necessary emotional gutpunch, resorting to a coda of “I’ll climb and I’ll climb” that resembles the pithy pop-motivational tracks of Fun. or Katy Perry.

Other tracks maintain this personal engagement, but the connection is lacking. The theme of a stale marriage, addressed in ‘Life To Come’, is potentially interesting: rather than songs always focusing on the initial intrigue of infatuation, it addresses the difficult matter of then spending an entire lifetime with one person. The topic has, however, been more convincingly (and uncomfortably) mined in literature by Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love or in music by much of The National’s recent Sleep Well Beast. Flowers’ take, on the other hand, seems shallow and never connects, resorting to by-numbers imagery of fields of amber. Similar is his coming-of-age tale of learning tough lessons, when a nine-year-old Brandon watched his hero Mike Tyson unexpectedly defeated by Buster Douglas. This whole quest for psychological turmoil painfully recalls Tim Minchin’s attempts to “Try and invoke some angst in his middle class head”.

In all, it’s an album with an admirable sense of ambition and innovation, a band pushing themselves sonically and lyrically in new directions; that they at times come up short is therefore a shame. The Killers remain a act whose relevance lies predominantly in their status as live entertainment, and this album will be remembered mainly for the two or three power hits that bolster their setlist, but the keen fan who explores the album will be rewarded with a couple of tracks that shouldn’t go forgotten.

The Guardian 60

(Virgin EMI)

Reintroducing a little electronic hauteur to the airpunch anthemics of 2012’s Battle Born, the Killers’ fifth album opens impressively with the reptilian title track, reminiscent of Achtung Baby-era U2, and the glossy, ironic funk of The Man. Misgivings hover, though, around frontman Brandon Flowers overcoming writer’s block by drawing on his initially reluctant wife’s abusive childhood and PTSD (and enlisting their three young sons to sing “Can’t do this alone/ We need you at home” on the airy, dreamy Some Kind of Love). The most striking song (discounting the Personal Jesus reenactment The Calling) draws on Flowers’ own childhood experience: the surging, synth-laced Tyson vs Douglas, inspired by his shock when the champ hit the mat, could touch gloves with the band’s best.