Artist: Killers, The
Label: Island Records
Release: numbers
Length: 61:42
Rating: 4/5
Direct Hits, released in 2013, is the definitive best-of collection from Las Vegas band The Killers. Ten years of work are packed into 15 tracks from 4 albums, a tangled web of arrangement elements typical of today’s well-established indie-pop veterans. The trip into the main theme (the squalor and glitz of Las Vegas romance) of a decade of music-making starts with the debut album Hot Fuss.
Hot Fuss, The Killers’ debut, remains one of the band’s most naive works and, at the same time, one of the cornerstones of the indie-pop scene of its day. In a city where the clubs mostly welcomed commercial acts, the Killers won over the ears of the unsigned crowd on the scene back then with their distinctive, catchier riffs and romantically minded songwriting. Direct Hits includes 4 tracks from that era, and Mr. Brightside and All These Things That I’ve Done are the best known of them. The sixteenth-note rhythm and lo-fi (i.e. extremely muffled, distorted vocals) of Mr. Brightside, together with Brandon’s lovesick woes over a prostitute, blend into one of the songs that defined an era of the genre. With his mixing skills, Alan Moulder breathed in a special tone of the new-romantic era, which you can hear in All These Things That I’ve Done; »I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier.« with its hypnotic repetition and vocal spaciousness, those words remain an anthem for The Killers’ most loyal listeners.
Sam’s Town paints a different sonic picture of the band; fewer synth-pop touches and more emphasis on gritty riffs and rhythms, but still the same analog, raw touch of Alan Moulder. The band’s coming of age is marked above all by the song When You Were Young, where Keuning and his blazing riffs were given a bit more arrangement room. The earlier romantic (almost »angsty«) veil of the band flirts with ideas of growing up and regret on Sam’s Town. The traces of new romanticism haven’t disappeared, of course; Read My Mind keeps carrying that saturated synth-pop atmosphere, which still gives the band its signature sound today.
The Killers more than successfully combined their arrangement niche of synth-pop with almost danceable (yet more traditional, occasionally jazzy) rhythms on their commercially most successful album, Day & Age. The record cemented the band’s place on the global music scene for good, above all with the songs Human and Spaceman. The enigmatic »Are we human, or are we dancer?« remains one of the band’s most prominent songwriting tricks. Spaceman also proves the band’s capacity for self-irony and humor, as in a song dedicated to aliens they poke fun at the gullible American population. Day & Age shows an extremely focused approach to arrangement in a new recording environment under a new producer, Stuart Price. Moving on from teenage romances, The Killers invented, in just a few tries, their own recipe for mixing dance rhythms and synthetic sounds into a lighter form of lucid dreaming. The gritty riffs are gone, and so is the melancholy of growing up; The Killers went back to the roots of their first album and produced a record of undeniable sonic and design quality. After the success of Day & Age, the band members faced a period of hiatus and devoted themselves to their own solo projects, among them Flowers’ solo album Flamingo.
After a period of recharging their batteries, the band got back together and gave birth to a fourth batch of songs on the album Direct Hits. At first glance, this fourth batch fits awkwardly with the earlier repertoire, since some components (like the similarity of the guitar riff in the middle of Miss Atomic Bomb to the lead guitar riff of Mr. Brightside) sound worn out. A closer listen, though, reveals a prism of interwoven stories, feelings and a measure of self-irony in songs that are themselves a reminder of the earlier material. This is exactly where The Killers set themselves apart from their »genre peers«; they’re able to accept the band’s image and existence with a dose of humor, as if to say »We enjoy this, it’s our thing«. Miss Atomic Bomb and Shot At The Night thus prove the Las Vegas band’s enduring elan, with a sonic signature that still rests on Flowers’ vocal abilities, songwriting with a pinch of new romanticism, and a synthetic indie-pop arrangement niche.
The beauty of Direct Hits lies precisely in its synthetic-analytical nature. To a casual listener it may look like just one more collection of commercially successful »hits«, but the real message goes much deeper. Regardless of trends in production and arranging, The Killers charted their development in step with the global music scene, rose over the course of ten years to become one of the best »live« acts around, and settled into the indie-pop landscape as veterans with soul.
Lineup
Brandon Flowers – lead vocals, keyboards
Dave Keuning – guitar, backing vocals
Mark Stoermer – bass guitar, backing vocals
Ronnie Vannucci Jr. – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Production
The Killers, Alan Moulder, Stuart Price, et al.
Tracklist
The Killers – Direct Hits:
1. Mr. Brightside
2. Somebody Told Me
3. Smile Like You Mean It
4. All These Things That I’ve Done
5. When You Were Young
6. Read My Mind
7. For Reasons Unknown
8. Human
9. Spaceman
10. A Dustland Fairytale
11. Runaways
12. Miss Atomic Bomb
13. The Way It Was
14. Shot At the Night
15. Just Another Girl
