You can let silly facts get in the way of seeing Direct Hits as one of the most hotly anticipated records of the past 10 years*.* Sure, the Killers have technically released four albums and a collection of miscellany that have sold over 20 million copies worldwide and the cool reception to last year’s kinda OK Battle Born suggests their days as a A-list rock band are pretty much over. But c0me on, we knew from the start that was all going to be irrelevant prelude at some point. In 2004, we had a couple of guys from Las Vegas with a careerist streak so blatant it was actually charming and Hot Fuss, an album with gargantuan singles and a complete lack of even adequate deep cuts. This pattern would be repeated three times over and as the years accrued, we fantasized of “Human” or “Runaways” being extracted from their vestigial incubators and collected on a Greatest Hits record that would be amazing. And how many other bands from the past decade can honestly claim more than four actual hits? From that point forward, it would be the only Killers album anyone would ever need, and perhaps seen as the only album they ever made. So how does Direct Hits still manage to disappoint even if we’ve already heard every single song on it?
For one thing, Direct Hits is mostly chronological. Mostly. It begins with “Mr. Brightside”, and rightfully so, since it’s not only the Killers’ best song, but also one of the 2000’s as well. And it was the band’s first single back in 2003. But it shares a complex, tangled history competing with “Somebody Told Me”, as both had multiple releases and alternate videos, targeted for different markets. “Somebody Told Me” was the song that presented the Killers as a particularly UK-friendly Next Big Thing. The plural moniker generated a tentative association with the Strokes or the Vines, who were already signaling the commercial obsolescence of the "New Rock Revival." But the Killers actually got their name from the video for New Order’s “Crystal”, and there was a requisite disco thump and a cheeky, gender-bending sexuality in the chorus that placed them as an American counterpart to bands like Franz Ferdinand. Singer Brandon Flowers wore makeup too and that didn’t hurt. “Somebody Told Me” was certainly catchy, though their libido wasn’t remotely believable even if you didn’t know they were Mormons. If Hot Fuss stalled at “Somebody Told Me”, the Killers would be remembered more fondly than their thoroughly-ethered rivals in the Bravery, but not by much.
Of course, the thought of “Mr. Brightside” somehow falling on deaf ears is more absurd than any of the faces made by Eric Roberts in its indisputably pitch-perfect video. Following in the lineage of “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” or “Jessie’s Girl”, the song itself is a karaoke classic for men grappling with the catastrophic realities of a woman choosing to have sex with someone who isn’t him. Only now, it’s given a properly dashing and desperate musical conduit and a performance by Flowers that makes the finest use of his limited range and dodgy breath control. But it was the track's second, Sophie Muller-directed video that sealed the deal, that truly unlocked the band’s potential as prime purveyors of ham & cheese—as Ryan Dombal noted, Roberts and Flowers are dueling over a game of checkers, and therein lies the Killers’ best look, stupendously simple, pure Vegas glitz, overwhelming in its accessible gaudiness. Whereas most bands musically summoning 80s teenage drama went backwards to channel John Hughes' visual aesthetic, the Killers went for the ostentatious, delightfully tacky drama of Moulin Rouge! and clearly, fellow Las Vegans Panic! At the Disco were watching.
For the rest of Hot Fuss’ album cycle, the Killers wisely followed suit: the pompous stomp of “All These Things That I’ve Done” was set to a video where Flowers co-opts his entire suburban desperado chic from Violator-era Dave Gahan and “Smile Like You Mean It” is the platonic ideal for a fourth single that can coast on the success of the previous three. Before I die, I hope to meet someone who truly believes side-B cuts like “Andy, You’re a Star” and “Midnight Show” are the heart of Hot Fuss rather than proof of the Killers’ debut being one of the most laughably lopsided albums of the past two decades. But with those hits, combined with Hot Fuss opener and de facto single “Jenny Was A Friend of Mine”, the Killers accomplished what so many wanted of them, which was make the 2000s' answer to side A of Duran Duran’s Rio.
But soon thereafter, it wasn’t enough to hear Bono and Chris Martin drop “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” in their live shows as a kind of torch-sharing. The Killers wanted to be U2 or Coldplay, not in sound so much as in reputation. In short, a band whose campiness often appears to be some sort of glandular problem rather than a product of artistic intent, but are nonetheless given the benefit of the doubt and taken seriously. You might remember how this turned out, and so Direct Hits does exactly what it’s supposed to: salvage “When You Were Young” and make you forget everything that made Sam’s Town something other than Hotter Fuss. Which is to say, the Americana fixations (inexplicably reprised on Day & Age’s DOA single “A Dustland Fairytale”), the moralizing drug PSA “Uncle Johnny”, “Enterlude”, and “Exitlude”, and all the classic rock maneuvers that showed four musicians far out of their depth. At least on “When You Were Young”, their Springsteen ambitions were charming: you can spot the baldfaced “Born to Run” rip in the descending chord changes and the “Thunder Road” iconography, though Flowers’ honking vocals often make it sound more like the most compact Meat Loaf song ever written. But once again, it’s a blast to sing along with and Killers simply steamrolled any criticism the way true hits are meant to. Sam’s Town has since sold an estimated five million copies. Did you know this? You can currently acquire many of them on Amazon for less money than a postage stamp, but that’s not the Killers' problem, is it?
It actually is, at least in the way Direct Hits plays out. By the time you’ve finished the fifth track on Direct Hits, that’s all the Hot Fuss singles and “When You Were Young”. You have 13 more to go, including a demo of “Mr. Brightside” and the Calvin Harris remix of “When You Were Young”. The big draw is “Shot at the Night”, their collaboration with Anthony Gonzalez of M83, an act that hasn’t exactly overtaken Killers in terms of arena-filling synth-pop bombast, but have certainly cut into their market share. Like Direct Hits, you know what’s coming and it’s still kinda deflating: once again, the Killers adapt only the most obvious signifiers of their charges, M83’s hollowed-out synth tones, neon synth riffs not too different than their own, and an obsession with the connotative properties of “the night.” I don’t think Anthony Gonzalez is phoning it in here, though he’s big enough to do it—similar to Oblivion, it just shows that when it comes to soundtracking blockbusters, he’s a much better boss than an employee.
Though their last truly ubiquitous single, “When You Were Young” established a problematic thread that ran through Sam’s Town, the “try everything” third LP Day & Age, and Battle Born, three very different albums that are of more or less of equal quality. There was a dissonance between what many listeners wanted out of the Killers and how the Killers saw themselves. They were in some aspects students of classic rock, though not particularly good ones, skimming the Boss, Bowie (“Spaceman”), New Order (“Human”), Journey (most of Battle Born), and the Cars (“Read My Mind”) like they were assignments handed down from their label. Likewise, many heard “are we human or are we dancer?” as a phenomenal non-sequitur, and it probably would be if Flowers didn’t make it a point to say he was actually paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson. The Killers performed at a 2010 “Salute to the Military” show at the White House and didn’t even play the one song that contains their most well-known lyric, which is about SOLDIERS. Does Flowers' unyielding belief in his own profundity make Direct Hits even more effective as camp? Or does it make you feel like there’s a disconnect, that the Killers stopped believing there was a joke to be in on after Hot Fuss? And why weren't they any fun?
Even more damning is that most of the songs on Direct Hits stopped becoming hits. Or, at least the kind that are meant to be included on Greatest Hits collections, ones that you simply couldn’t avoid even if you tried. Chart performance is typically meaningless in 2013, but the Killers actively seek out hits and have all the resources to make them happen. If they flop on the charts, that’s on them. And yet, they did flop—“Spaceman” peaked at #67 on the Billboard Hot 100 and promptly disappeared into the void. At its most popular, “A Dustland Fairytale” still trailed 35 songs on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. Long-forgotten “When You Were Young” follow-up “Bones” isn’t even included here. The truly worthy comeback single “Runaways” stalled out at #7 on the Alternative charts behind Imagine Dragons and we were left to wonder whether Las Vegas was big enough for the both of them.
At this point, the Killers are either a phenomenally successful cult act or a headliner in serious decline, and neither seems particularly flattering for a band that’s always aiming for the cheap seats. They topped a night of Coachella back in 2009, but it was a sparsely attended weekend that stood as the festival's bottoming out. (In their defense, give it four years and their headliner gig will look more justified than that of Phoenix.) Battle Born was by far their weakest chart performance yet, but look at it this way—they moved 114,000 copies in week one, whereas Arcade Fire’s first major label record just did 140,000 with far more visibility and career momentum. And Battle Born still got voted as the #2 album in Rolling Stone’s 2012 readers poll with “Miss Atomic Bomb” clocking in as the #1 single, a testament to the diehard fanbase of Victims. (No, I did not just make up that name for the Killers' diehard fanbase, it is 100% real.) If you’re doubting their intensity, when Rolling Stone ran a similar poll in 2009 for “most underrated album of the decade,” what finished at #1? Sam’s Town.
But a Greatest Hits collection is supposed to surprise you with the familiar, to tease out how many songs from a certain band you’ve heard in the wild and make you think “wow, I didn’t realize that was all them.” Direct Hits proves the Killers have fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought and makes you wonder if they made their Greatest Hits album too early or whether they can ever legitimately put one together at all.
