THE KILLERS – HOT FUSS (ISLAND RECORDS)
November 19th, 2004 by susanna
The Killers – Hot Fuss (Island Records)
Big Chillers. Sheesh. Couldn’t hum their way out of a flotation tank.
Those fluffy hippies. They only listen to whale noises. Sometimes as a special treat they might have some whispering choral voices, meditative humming and the odd electronic boink, while a triangle tings quietly in the background at key moments. Spaced out vibes, maaan. The perfect music to listen to while sipping some Chardonnay and contemplating one’s navel fluff.
Yeah right. Scratch any chiller (gently, mind) and underneath you’ll find pulsating great beasts of rawk. There’s a huge prog rock contingent lurking behind those ambient electronica fans (in fact don’t even mention prog on The Forum if you want to avoid three page eulogies to seventeen minute tracks with titles like “Mumps”).
Forum regular and Big Chill DJ Enchanted Gordon has recently developed a frankly worrying passion for Scandinavian death metal bands fronted by goblins. Rifle through many chillers’ record collections and in between the lush soundscapes can be found Napalm Death, Fugazi, Guns n Roses, Metallica, you name it. Hell, I used to buy Kerrang! religiously. (Ahem).
Even chief chiller Pete Lawrence recently confessed, in a tribute to the late, great John Peel: “I must admit that I’d frequently take my girlfriend home early in order to get home and start taping the likes of The Adverts, The Ramones, The Slits and Siouxsie and The Banshees.”
So it’s not really a surprise that I’ve fallen in love with a rock and roll band.
It all happened one Saturday morning. I was crashed out on the sofa, squinting through a spectacular gin hangover. I was barely alive. I just wanted to sip tea, watch CD:UK and get some chewing gum for my eyes. Some nice manufactured pop tarts in pretty colours and shiny things. Not too many jump cuts. Maybe a smidgen of Beyonce.
Instead I froze, with the toast half way to my mouth, as The Killers strutted into my living room with “All These Things That I’ve Done”. The tea went cold.
From the opening seconds you know it’s something special. Something kind of epic, kind of fey, kind of dazzling. Hell, it even sounds a little bit like Queen. Then, you think it’s a nice chunky slice of proper great indie rock. Then it all but stops, the guitars growl quietly, and it flips around and picks up a gospel choir and a totally glam rock sound as heartstoppingly charismatic frontman Brandon Flowers strides around the stage deadpanning “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier..”
So I bought the album on the strength of one track and it rocks my world. In that way albums used to, when you want to play them over and over and over again until your parents beg for mercy, you wear out your cassette, you want to put tracks from it on your compilation tape that you’re sweating blood over so that all-consuming crush will know how cool and madly in love with them you are, when it’ll say everything you want to say but are too fumbling and incoherent to manage it.
It’s taut, sexy rock, with a stardust sprinkle of influences from all over the place. The driving intensity of early U2, the offbeat darkness of The Cure, the gloss and glamour of Duran Duran and the spiky strut of early Suede. They have that dirty gleam in their eyes that the Scissor Sisters do so well, as 80s-style synthesisers wash all over the swaggering guitar licks. (Actually, if you don’t like synthesisers, you should probably stop reading now.)
Their songs barrel forward with guts and glitter, no namby-pamby milk-fed indie mewings here – rather one track is called ‘Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll’, which sums The Killers up perfectly. (Though unfortunately it’s one of the weaker tracks on the album.)
What else is there to love? The band were forged in the neon of Las Vegas but Flowers sings with a raw English accent soaked in arrogance and cool. I just love his voice. There’s a lot of lead singers who sound a bit like him, but he has that indefinable something that makes it all work. His drawling, deadpan delivery and strutting stage presence reek of Bowie and Byrne, and stand head and shoulders above the hundred other indie-rock soundalikes currently clogging the charts.
The album isn’t perfect. Closing track ‘Everything Will Be Alright’ is genuinely terrible. Total car crash. Horrible tortured screeching over home Casio keyboard synths. You’ll want to put Flowers out of his misery, preferably with a length of 2 by 4. ‘Believe Me Natalie’ is pretty dull, while ‘Andy, You’re A Star’ just plods along in a squelch of whirring synths and Flowers’ funereal intonations to ‘Hey shut up’. It sinks, weighted down by its own shouty grandeur. If you’re significantly drunk and depressed, you’ll probably wail along until local cats start to yowl back at you.
But you’ll forgive them all this for gems like singles ‘Mr Brightside’ – irresistible, driving, poppy brilliance that Sum 41 or Busted would kill for – and the epic, sneaky, T-Rex echo, ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’. Lowdown and dirty ‘On Top’ is a beautiful mixture of warm shimmery guitar, sparky keyboards and Flowers’s edgy, sexy delivery: ‘It’s just a shimmy and a shake oh oh, I can’t fake, we’re on top’.
‘Midnight Show” is a breathless slice of stripped down rock that would sit very easily on U2′s ‘War’ album, and that’s no bad thing. Then there’s the punky insistence of ‘Somebody Told Me’, which from the first jagged synth stabs rattles along like a Fender-fuelled take on Blur’s ‘Girls and Boys’, as Flowers all but yells: ‘It’s not confidential, I’ve got potential…’
He sure has. But it doesn’t really matter whether he fulfils it, whether that second album is better, or whether the band lasts on into their rock and roll dotage. This is an album for right here, right now, turn the volume right up. It might not be a flawless record, but since when did you fall in love with flawless?
Kit Patrick
The Killers’ ‘Hot Fuss’ is out now on Island Records
