I wasn't sure what artist I'd have in the 187th volume of this series, especially since I already did Snoop and Dre playlists, so you can imagine my excitement when I realized I was working on a playlist of The Killers, who are releasing their 6th album Imploding The Mirage this week, and they'd be appropriate for 1-8-7. So let's go visit Jenny, Jonny, Andy, Natalie, and of course, Sam.

The Killers deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Believe Me Natalie
2. This River Is Wild
3. Battle Born
4. Move Away
5. Losing Touch
6. Change Your Mind
7. Heart Of A Girl
8. Sam's Town
9. Neon Tiger
10. Leave The Bourbon On The Shelf
11. Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine
12. Midnight Show
13. Have All The Songs Been Written?
14. My List
15. Andy, You're A Star
16. Glamorous Indie Rock And Roll
17. Uncle Jonny
(I've had it with this game!!)
18. Joy Ride
19. Life To Come

Tracks 1, 6, 11, 12 and 15 from Hot Fuss (2004)
Tracks 2, 8, 14 and 17 from Sam's Town (2006)
Tracks 4, 10 and 16 from Sawdust (2007)
Tracks 5, 9 and 18 from Day & Age (2008)
Tracks 3 and 7 from Battle Born (2012)
Tracks 13 and 19 from Wonderful Wonderful (2017)

The Killers are a band I have kind of a love/hate relationship with. They came out of the gate with a huge ubiquitous album, I don't know if any rock band since has had the kind of reach they had circa "Mr. Brightside." And Hot Fuss was an alright album, I remember my wife playing it a lot until her copy got stolen out of her car with some other CDs. But even then it felt like Brandon Flowers was this total weirdo who wrote really weird lyrics and happened to have a pop star look -- sort of like he was not just an '80s fanatic but a real Duran Duran-type vapidly deep guy himself. It's weird to think that 3 of the most popular bands of the last couple decades (The Killers, Imagine Dragons, and Panic! At The Disco) all came out of Las Vegas, a place that had produced few bands of note before that.

Sam's Town was a really divisive record at the time, and it's funny to think that a band caused such a stir by saying they were really influenced by Bruce Springsteen, something that became really ordinary and uncontroversial in the following years. But in retrospect, I really like Sam's Town and think it's their best album. Meanwhile, My Chemical Romance also took a big classic rock pivot a month later on The Black Parade with more success, and I really don't like that album as much as the MCR albums directly before and after it.

There are some bands where I like the drummer more than everything else about the band, and The Killers is an example of that -- Ronnie Vannucci Jr. just has a great feel, really gives them a loose and muscular arena rock grandeur where they could've just sounded like another stiff synth rock band with a different drummer. The fills and patterns he plays on songs like "Believe Me Natalie," "Battle Born," great stuff, he's a joy to listen to.

The band liked Stuart Price's remixes of "Mr. Brightside" and "When You Were Young" so much that they asked him to produce their third album, Day & Age. That's not the first time a rock band has worked with a dance producer after he remixed them -- that would probably be Happy Mondays and Paul Oakenfold on Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches -- but I think it's always pretty interesting when that happens and it speaks well of the band's adaptability. I hadn't listened to Day & Age beyond the singles before, it's better than I expected. And unlike a lot of rock-band-with-dance-producers stuff, Price doesn't just replace the drummer with loops and breaks, Vannucci is still in there doing his thing.

They released a rarities compilation, Sawdust, between their 2nd and 3rd proper albums, and in interviews they namechecked classic b-sides comps that '90s bands released at the height of their fame like Incesticide and Pisces Iscariot. I thought it was pretty cool that they were kind of consciously participating in a sort of alternative rock tradition. The comp included "Glamorous Indie Rock And Roll," a song with a very tongue-in-cheek title that was one of their most talked about tracks circa Hot Fuss even though it was only on the U.K. version of the album (in place of "Change Your Mind"), not the U.S. edition. I also really love "Move Away," which might have been left off Sam's Town because it would've been too much of an outlier but it's a great example of The Killers' more jagged post-punk roots.

Sawdust also included "Leave The Bourbon On The Shelf," which the band envisioned as the first chapter of their 'Murder Trilogy.' The other two songs, "Midnight Show" and "Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine," were both on Hot Fuss, but the full trilogy was never on one record (sort of like how "Footsteps" from Eddie Vedder's serial killer-themed 'Mamasan Trilogy' demo for Pearl Jam never got on Ten like the others). So it was fun to present those songs in sequence in this playlist, on tracks 10, 11 and 12.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26, 2020 at 8:22 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.