Item: THRASHER
Rating: 8
Author: guardian

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THRASHER by Brandon Flowers reviewed by guardian — 8.0/10 | Wavelength | Wavelength

Killers frontman’s country pivot is a rootin’ tootin’ cowboy-bootin’ hoot!

That’s how you get a record like Thrasher. Flowers’ third solo album finds Vegas’s chosen son decamping to Nashville for a full-throated exploration of country music – not subtle, trendy Americana, but rip-snorting, honky-tonking, Nudie suit-wearing country. In many ways, Thrasher is a stylistic follow-up to the Killers’ maudlin 2021 Pressure Machine, which saw Flowers explore windswept balladry and tasteful story-songs. But that record was as forgettable as Thrasher is a hoot; Flowers wilts when he doesn’t fully commit, as was the case on Pressure Machine, and he doesn’t make that mistake here. Thrasher features many of Nashville’s most revered country musicians, including pedal steel legend Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy, Gillian Welch’s musical partner Dave Rawlings and lauded Americana musician Margo Price.

This deep bench doesn’t obscure Flowers’ oddball tendencies. On rollicking opener Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?, he writes like a man who’s done his 10,000 hours absorbing pop music cliches and now feels equipped to write his own. “I could’ve been born in Bangladesh / But I wasn’t, I was born here / With just enough jellybeans in my basket / To ask you to go a’wishing on a star,” he sings, injecting his nonsense with such gravitas and moxie that it’s easy to believe that’s something people say.

Those weird turns of phrase invigorate Thrasher’s many character studies. Tiger’s Blood would be good-but-ordinary Springsteen pastiche, with its repeated refrain of “like a runaway train”, but Flowers makes this story of a “cheerleader working the till [who] wants to get outta this podunk place” his own with weird, specific images – of “peach-fuzz boys getting hard in the corner on Mortal Kombat” and a “swamp cooler leaking down the bricks outside”. Especially great is all the idiosyncratic detail on closer An American Dream, its universal-sounding title concealing seemingly the most surreal song on Thrasher. As it builds, Flowers stacks evocative image upon evocative image: “A Guinness World Record holder / For the longest fall living”; “Elvis in a Tesla Model X”; “lights that flicker on hubcap chrome.”

As on Pressure Machine, Flowers takes a couple of big swings, both of them misses. On Miss America, he writes from the perspective of a young woman in an abusive relationship. Although this is something of a pet topic for Flowers, he is not a particularly elegant writer; amid all the salacious euphemisms for abuse, he sings things like: “Truth be told / Grown men have noticed me since I was 12 years old / It always made me feel like some kind of prize / I guess I saw my worth through their porno eyes.” But even that feels graceful in comparison to Angel. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Angel is a song about a talented Black baseball player who starts dating a white girl. Angel and the girl have a daughter, and Angel is deployed to be in the navy, after which he abandons his wife and kid to become a drug smuggler. The song ends with Angel being pulled over by the cops and attempting to evade them on foot.

It’s impossible to comprehend how Flowers thought this song was a good idea. When Angel and his girlfriend have their baby, he sings the lines “Chocolate and vanilla swirls / There’s gonna be a little girl”. Flowers supposedly wrote more than 30 songs for the record, meaning there were at least 20 alternatives. The place Flowers lands – “It don’t matter how far you’ve come / Or how well you ran the race / You’re gonna have to come face to face / With that thing you’ve always known to be true / That you buried inside of you” – could be a critique of American racial hegemony, or it could be flat-out racist, implying that our fates are hardwired. I strongly suspect that it’s an attempt at the former, but that it could feasibly be taken either way is an indictment in itself.

Flowers has always had occasional bouts of foot-in-mouth – this simply feels like a particularly bad one. A big part of Angel’s failure is that it is one of the few genuinely dull songs on the album – plodding and dirgey, with an attempt at a pathos-drenched chorus that has little of the spark or fleet-footedness of the rest of the album. Although it lacks the attention-grabbing singles of 2015’s The Desired Effect, Flowers’ last solo record, Thrasher is front-to-back a far stronger, more enjoyable album that could even win over fans who haven’t tapped in since Mr Brightside. The westernwear suits him.

Here are three immutable facts about Brandon Richard Flowers: he was born just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. He is 45 years old. And he never does anything by halves. When he and his band the Killers debuted in the early 2000s, as disaffected New York cool was on the rise, he was writing scream-along choruses sung in his upper register. When the Killers were searching for a sound even bigger and grander than the euphoric Springsteen pastiche of 2006’s Sam’s Town, they didn’t think twice before recruiting Stuart Price to produce the spangly 2008 disco-rock record Day & Age. That’s how you get a record like Thrasher. Flowers’ third solo album finds Vegas’s chosen son decamping to Nashville for a full-throated exploration of country music – not subtle, trendy Americana, but rip-snorting, honky-tonking, Nudie suit-wearing country. In many ways, Thrasher is a stylistic follow-up to the Killers’ maudlin 2021 Pressure Machine, which saw Flowers explore windswept balladry and tasteful story-songs. But that record was as forgettable as Thrasher is a hoot; Flowers wilts when he doesn’t fully commit, as was the case on Pressure Machine, and he doesn’t make that mistake here. Thrasher features many of Nashville’s most revered country musicians, including pedal steel legend Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy, Gillian Welch’s musical partner Dave Rawlings and lauded Americana musician Margo Price. This deep bench doesn’t obscure Flowers’ oddball tendencies. On rollicking opener Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?, he writes like a man who’s done his 10,000 hours absorbing pop music cliches and now feels equipped to write his own. “I could’ve been born in Bangladesh / But I wasn’t, I was born here / With just enough jellybeans in my basket / To ask you to go a’wishing on a star,” he sings, injecting his nonsense with such gravitas and moxie that it’s easy to believe that’s something people say. Those weird turns of phrase invigorate Thrasher’s many character studies. Tiger’s Blood would be good-but-ordinary Springsteen pastiche, with its repeated refrain of “like a runaway train”, but Flowers makes this story of a “cheerleader working the till [who] wants to get outta this podunk place” his own with weird, specific images – of “peach-fuzz boys getting hard in the corner on Mortal Kombat” and a “swamp cooler leaking down the bricks outside”. Especially great is all the idiosyncratic detail on closer An American Dream, its universal-sounding title concealing seemingly the most surreal song on Thrasher. As it builds, Flowers stacks evocative image upon evocative image: “A Guinness World Record holder / For the longest fall living”; “Elvis in a Tesla Model X”; “lights that flicker on hubcap chrome.” As on Pressure Machine, Flowers takes a couple of big swings, both of them misses. On Miss America, he writes from the perspective of a young woman in an abusive relationship. Although this is something of a pet topic for Flowers, he is not a particularly elegant writer; amid all the salacious euphemisms for abuse, he sings things like: “Truth be told / Grown men have noticed me since I was 12 years old / It always made me feel like some kind of prize / I guess I saw my worth through their porno eyes.” But even that feels graceful in comparison to Angel. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Angel is a song about a talented Black baseball player who starts dating a white girl. Angel and the girl have a daughter, and Angel is deployed to be in the navy, after which he abandons his wife and kid to become a drug smuggler. The song ends with Angel being pulled over by the cops and attempting to evade them on foot. It’s impossible to comprehend how Flowers thought this song was a good idea. When Angel and his girlfriend have their baby, he sings the lines “Chocolate and vanilla swirls / There’s gonna be a little girl”. Flowers supposedly wrote more than 30 songs for the record, meaning there were at least 20 alternatives. The place Flowers lands – “It don’t matter how far you’ve come / Or how well you ran the race / You’re gonna have to come face to face / With that thing you’ve always known to be true / That you buried inside of you” – could be a critique of American racial hegemony, or it could be flat-out racist, implying that our fates are hardwired. I strongly suspect that it’s an attempt at the former, but that it could feasibly be taken either way is an indictment in itself. Flowers has always had occasional bouts of foot-in-mouth – this simply feels like a particularly bad one. A big part of Angel’s failure is that it is one of the few genuinely dull songs on the album – plodding and dirgey, with an attempt at a pathos-drenched chorus that has little of the spark or fleet-footedness of the rest of the album. Although it lacks the attention-grabbing singles of 2015’s The Desired Effect, Flowers’ last solo record, Thrasher is front-to-back a far stronger, more enjoyable album that could even win over fans who haven’t tapped in since Mr Brightside. The westernwear suits him.