Rock music in the 21st century has been subject to an unprecedented emotional arms race of Cold War proportions. Displaced from its traditional role of party music by dance and hip-hop, rock has focused more than ever on introspection, aiming for resonant feelings rather than escapist fun. Hence, pop-punk has given way to emo, hard rock acts dust off the power ballad to get airplay, and groups like Coldplay and Green Day fill stadiums with soul-searching anthems. It's only natural that the emotional ante would be rapidly rising, until it reaches the climax of triggering arena-rock's nuclear option: The Boss.
The Killers would seem unlikely participants in the battle to protect The Great American Rock Song, having drawn more comparisons to Duran Duran than Bob Seger on their awkwardly-titled debut Hot Fuss. But for all the band's synth-pop dressings, their greatest success, both artistically and commercially, was with "Mr. Brightside", a woe-is-me epic that skillfully deployed the group's flimsy new-wave organ to shift the song into a second gear of cinematic sorrow. No dummies, the Killers choose to stay on the horse that got them to the A-list with Sam's Town, spending an entire album looking to build on that track's unabashed glory and so drafting as their muse someone who knows a bit about glory, one Bruce Springsteen.
It's worth noting that the Killers aren't the only contemporary artist to recently start drawing inspiration from Jersey's poet laureate, with everyone from Destroyer to the Hold Steady making like they're the E Street Band this year. Springsteen may seem like a weird indie-fluence, but given his talents for transforming the passions and struggles of the common people into earnest vocal-cord-splitting rock mythology, it all makes sense. Just take a listen to the young man's melodrama of "Born to Run" without the "Greatest Song Ever" baggage it has accumulated, and wonder why Springsteen wasn't ordained as the patron saint of emo years ago.
However, emulating The Boss isn't as easy as hiring a sax player and tying a bandana to your head-- and missing the mark by mistaking Springsteen's broadness for simplicity can lead a band toward an ill-advised and pretentious flop. On Sam's Town, the Killers attempt to incorporate several components of the Springsteen formula: super-sizing their guitar sound, creating fictional characters to externalize their angst, singing boldface banner statements in an impassioned vibrato. Most tellingly, the band's willingness to flirt with ambition is so daring that they include an "Enterlude" and an "Exitlude", bookends that aspire to set these songs within a setting that may or may not be based on the Vegas townie casino of the album's title.
When the Killers hit their mark, they create refreshingly huge rock, the sound of a band unashamed of their success; when they miss, it's testimony that the right ingredients don't always create the same dish. Both of these outcomes are simultaneously present in lead single "When You Were Young", which successfully inherits the thrilling synthesizer peaks of "Mr. Brightside" while tripping over the "Thunder Road"-aping refrain "he doesn't look a thing like Jesus,"-- clumsy, second-hand religious imagery masquerading as lyrical depth. Over and over again, the Killers get the medium mostly right (the sledgehammer chords of "This River Is Wild", the canned-string crescendos of the title track), but whiff on the message, too often resorting to Cliff-Note Americana like highways and rivers or cartoonish character studies like the addict protagonist of "Uncle Johnny".
The easy target for these near-misses is the madeover Brandon Flowers, though the Killers' new image means he's faced with the difficult task of shifting abruptly from his Robert Smith nasal-whine to Springsteenish bellow. For instance, quiet moments, like the bridge of "When You Were Young" or the outro to "This River Is Wild", reveal the heretofore unknown fact that aiming for Springsteen and missing even slightly results in Meat Loaf. Not that Flowers' bandmates help out any, as a key element of the arena-rock epic, awesome fucking fist-pumping backing vocals, are bungled at every opportunity, from the awkward "I SEE LONDON, I SEE SAM'S TOWN" of the opening track to the faux-Queen ("multi-tracking is hard, what if we all just sing in unison?") of "Bones".
Other places indicate that the band may have just gone for the wrong rock-icon; the reverb-chirp "higher and higher" peak of (seriously) "Bling (Confessions of a King)" indicates that the Killers are more successful impressionists of Achtung Baby-era U2. Perhaps it's that the comparatively vague platitudes of Bono fit the Killers more snugly than Springsteen's folk-based specificities, approaching the epic from a universal top-down rather than blowing up life's small moments into monuments (something the Hold Steady album, released on the same day as Sam's Town, gets more consistently right). Not fully realizing where their strengths and weaknesses lie makes Sam's Town, despite the drastic makeover, roughly equivalent to Hot Fuss, a mediocre album surrounding a few towering singles.
