Mildred - I also don't like Bones. :\ Well, not as yet.

 

My fave by faaaaar is Uncle Jonny... Great lyrics, such a catchy riff, just love it. Sounds like it could have been on Hot Fuss.

 

Other faves so far are Bling, Sam's Town (LOVE IT!) and For Reasons Unkown.

 

Only criticism is that i'm not really enjoying quite a few of the tracks - whereas when I bought Hot Fuss I immediatley liked pretty much every single track. There literally isn't a single one I don't like.

I dunno, maybe they will grow on me?....I hope so.

IneedYou23-Ummm, well honestly I think Its more a matter of taste. I listen to the song and it just doesnt feel like they put much effort into it. :\

 

Steph- Its true. Maybe its the fact that Brandon said that the album was going to be "all-around one of the best albums of the past decades", that made me expect so much more of the album. Im happy with it and all, but while some songs are awsome, others lack yanno, that something:)

My absolute favorites are: Sam's Town, Read My Mind:heart:(LOVVVVVEE IT!!!, Although the riff is pretty much ripped from Mr Brightside:uhoh2:), Reasons Unkown and Bling. :)

Sam's Town is incredible. My List is hypnotic. This River Is Wild is simply awesome.

 

And the rest of it is going to grow on me soon.

 

We hope you enjoy your stay...

I just bought it todayAnd i love it!I dont think its like Hot Fuss at all!This album has its own sound.I think a lot of people were expecting another Hot Fuss.But i do admit Hot Fuss is one of few albums that i can listen to the whole album without skipping a song.We'll see if Sams Town is like that but i love Sams Town either way!!

The Killers are doing the Big Day Out festival in Australia!!!! I can't wait to see them

The Killers: Sam's Town

 

 

Mercury, out Oct 2nd.

 

In a nutshell…

 

Anthemic. Long-awaited. Americana. Sophomore. Success.

 

What's it all about?

 

It's about the return of The Killers, those nice boys from Las Vegas who us Brits have taken to our hearts but have been somewhat ignored by those on the other side of the Atlantic. The very Anglo-Saxon influences that seep through whenever Brandon Flowers takes to the stage may well be to blame for that. From New Order to Pulp to Oasis, the higher echelons of Brit Pop and New Wave are all generously referenced. Indeed, it was from New Order's video for Crystal that the band's name was conceived.

 

But Flowers and co appear to have taken the lack of fuss their first album, Hot Fuss, caused in the good ol' US of A to heart and have sought to redress the balance. Sam's Town is a nod in the direction of Americana at its most brash. References to highways, hurricanes and two-star towns certainly don't seem to be aimed at striking a chord with Johnny, 19, from Camden? Chances are, however, that America will still overlook The Killers in favour of more palatable British bands like Coldplay. Or Keane. Or indeed Bruce Springsteen.

 

Who's it by?

 

The Killers came into being after lead singer Flowers got disenchanted by life in synth-pop band Blush Response in 2001 and put up an advert calling for fans of Oasis, who he had seen at a recent gig in his hometown of Las Vegas, to join him in a band. According to Flowers, the only person who "wasn't a complete freak" to reply was guitarist David Keuning. The duo later approached bassist Mark Stoermer and drummer Ronnie Vannucci and the band as it is now came together.

 

After getting noticed in England first and trumpeted by, among others, Radio 1, The Killers released Hot Fuss in June 2004 in the UK to great acclaim. It went on to go multi-platinum in both the US and UK, but it was in Britain where most copies were shifted and where Flowers' band went on to have arguably their finest moment. Having turned down the opportunity to come in as last-minute headline replacements for the sick Kylie Minogue, The Killers instead played second fiddle to the White Stripes at Glastonbury 2005. They proceeded to utterly outshine Jack White and friends and perform one of the best-received slots ever held in the venerable Somerset fields. Rumour has it they will be back as headliners next summer with, if this is not just a viciously ironic rumour in the wake of the critical reaction to Sam's Town, a certain Mr Springsteen.

 

As an example

 

"I still remember Grandma Dixie's wake/ I never really known anybody to die before/ Red white and blue upon a birthday cake/ And my brother, he was born on the fourth of the July...and that's all." – Sam's Town

 

"We're burning down the highway skyline/ On the back of a hurricane that started turning/ When you were young." – When You Were Young

 

Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys

 

Critics who previously built bands up on debut are notoriously harsh on second albums and the early reaction to Sam's Town is mixed to say the least. But the dangerous second album syndrome seems to have just about been avoided and The Killers are more than likely to be picking up a raft of awards for their efforts. Although whether they'll be as universally acclaimed as they were last year remains to be seen.

 

What the others say

 

"Sam's Town succeeds because the changes have not come at the expense of the tunes. The album doesn't lend Flowers the gravitas he apparently yearns for, but it does prove that few are better at irrepressible pop hooks and fist-pumping choruses." – The Guardian

 

"Why, Killers? Why? It's the oldest story in the New Wave book: (1) Boys get famous wearing makeup and acting tarty to impress girls; (2) Boys wash off makeup and act sincere to impress boys; (3) It never works." – Rolling Stone

 

"The tunes may be huger, the influences cleverer, the lyrics more adventurous and the band more self-assured, but their primary concern is still being the biggest indie-pop stars on the planet. For all their smart new ways, The Killers are still as flashy, unintentionally funny, and flagrantly affected as ever - and this time we wouldn't even pretend to have it any other way." – NME

 

So is it any good?

 

As soon as the opening bars of the thumping Sam's Town pulsate out of the speakers there can be no doubt about the origin of the Springsteen references. 'I've heard this somewhere before' the brain says, and indeed the three words 'born', 'to' and 'run' go swimming around the head without warning. The Killers have gone all epic on us and they figure there is no point hiding the fact. From the very first note on this album it is clear The Killers have moved on. Does it work? Mostly.

 

There's just so much of other people's music in here. The pointless Enterlude and Exitlude, which bracket the album's tracks bar the breathless Sam's Town and the bonus track Where the White Boys Dance, are straight out of the Beatles back catalogue. When You Were Young, the excellent single, contains an unexpected homage to that great American hero, Meatloaf, and Bling (Confessions of a King), for all its quality, often merges into U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.

 

For Reasons Unknown could have been written by Freddie Mercury, Where the White Boys Dance is Bowie-esque in the extreme and the list continues. This is not to say The Killers have lifted anyone else's work, Sam's Town is still distinctly original, but anyone coming to Sam's Town hoping for Hot Fuss part two will go away disappointed. Only Uncle Jonny sounds like The Killers of old and that can only be tinged with regret when The Killers of old were just so damn good.

 

That said, Sam's Town is more hit than miss. Read My Mind is a stunning slowburner, Sam's Town and When You Were Young only very narrowly fail to emulate The Boss in his prime and Bling (Confessions of a King) is arguably the best song on the record.

 

Flowers believes it is one of the best albums in 20 years. He says it's a grower and that the critics will come to agree with him in time. Those critics are mixed in their reactions. Some praise the new, leather-wearing, facial-hair heavy image while others pine for the glitzy 80s days of Somebody Told Me. Only time will tell who's right, but suffice to say that Sam's Town is a great Killers record. Just not as we know it.

 

7.5/10

 

http://www.inthenews.co.uk/entertainment/reviews/reviews/music/the-killers-sams-town-$453642.htm

Flowers believes it is one of the best albums in 20 years. He says it's a grower and that the critics will come to agree with him in time. Those critics are mixed in their reactions. Some praise the new, leather-wearing, facial-hair heavy image while others pine for the glitzy 80s days of Somebody Told Me. Only time will tell who's right, but suffice to say that Sam's Town is a great Killers record. Just not as we know it.

 

I dont agree its one of the best albums in the last 20 years, but its very good. Im seriously growing tired of Brandon saying that.

:)

Some praise the new' date=' leather-wearing, facial-hair heavy image while others pine for the glitzy 80s days of Somebody Told Me.[/b']

 

*continues pining!*

 

Sam's Town

The Killers

Island Records

 

(2 out of 5)

 

Las Vegas is a hell of a town. On a few miles of asphalt known as Las Vegas Boulevard, you can watch fake pirates engage in fake battles, see a fake volcano erupt, watch dancing girls with fake racks jiggle for your dollar bills, stuff yourself with fake crab legs for $5 at an all-you-can-eat buffet and watch fake high-rollers pretend it's no big deal to blow a month's wages in a roll of the dice. It's everything you want it to be, so long as you don't want it to be real.

 

So when The Killers came roaring out of the Jewel of the Desert in 2004 with Hot Fuss all decked out in eyeliner and lip gloss and armed with little more than a perfunctory command of Duran Duran, Cure and Bowie-isms, it was only natural to let the outfit be anything we wanted them to be, so long as we didn't ask them to be real. They were new-wave hit makers, reminding us of those long-gone new wave hits from MTV's early years. They were silly, charming boys ready to charm us with their clever videos, good looks and well-oiled pop machinations. They were guilty pleasures, sweets for sugar-tooth listening, comedic distractions from the day-to-day battles of real bands, dismissible fluff. They were anything but real.

 

Now with three-time Platinum certification, about a zillion magazine covers and 1.1 million instances of "Brandon Flowers" in the Google index, The Killers shoot for the one thing Hot Fuss couldn't generate: credibility. Trotting out of the glitz and glamour of light new wave overtones, The Killers trade their superfluous Duran Duran tendencies for allusions to U2. And while borrowing from the U2 blueprint worked for everyone from Coldplay and Keane to Bloc Party, it doesn't take on The Killer's foundation of new wave. Where sheer, giddy enjoyment of the act's disposable pop tunes on its last was reason enough for it to exist, Sam's Town shoots to establish The Killers as artists instead of two-dimensional pop stars. It doesn't work. Lead single "When You Were Young" looks back at the band's pop-idol fixation from its pedestal of sincerity, delivering the album's best song. The rest of the record, The Killers grasp desperately to prove they're more than the world's greatest Duran Duran cover band. Sometimes it's with heavy themes ("Uncle Jonny" tilts at tales of addiction), sometimes it's with arena rock posturing ("Read My Mind" sounds like a bad copy of Keane's bad copy of Coldplay's bad copy of U2) or pretentious aural dandruff that brazenly tempts, nay, begs, the world to use the "sophomore slump" cliché.

 

Whether you loved or hated Hot Fuss for it, The Killers' debut was an album that rose and fell on its crafty appropriation of glam-wave's use of the plastic, the disposable and the gleefully fake. In the band's scramble for substance, Sam's Town forces us to realize that The Killers aren't just a fantasy, Las Vegas stand-in for whatever we wanted them to be. They can't be your secret Duran Duran flashback, they can't be that stand-in for the new poppy Cure album, they can't be your David Bowie. They're The Killers -- and damn serious about it. The only problem is, after two years of filling our fantasies, they have nothing to offer when they get rid of everything that was fake about themselves.

 

http://www.aversion.com/bands/reviews.cfm?f_id=2802

 

Sam's Town

The Killers

Island Records

 

(2 out of 5)

 

Las Vegas is a hell of a town. On a few miles of asphalt known as Las Vegas Boulevard, you can watch fake pirates engage in fake battles, see a fake volcano erupt, watch dancing girls with fake racks jiggle for your dollar bills, stuff yourself with fake crab legs for $5 at an all-you-can-eat buffet and watch fake high-rollers pretend it's no big deal to blow a month's wages in a roll of the dice. It's everything you want it to be, so long as you don't want it to be real.

 

So when The Killers came roaring out of the Jewel of the Desert in 2004 with Hot Fuss all decked out in eyeliner and lip gloss and armed with little more than a perfunctory command of Duran Duran, Cure and Bowie-isms, it was only natural to let the outfit be anything we wanted them to be, so long as we didn't ask them to be real. They were new-wave hit makers, reminding us of those long-gone new wave hits from MTV's early years. They were silly, charming boys ready to charm us with their clever videos, good looks and well-oiled pop machinations. They were guilty pleasures, sweets for sugar-tooth listening, comedic distractions from the day-to-day battles of real bands, dismissible fluff. They were anything but real.

 

Now with three-time Platinum certification, about a zillion magazine covers and 1.1 million instances of "Brandon Flowers" in the Google index, The Killers shoot for the one thing Hot Fuss couldn't generate: credibility. Trotting out of the glitz and glamour of light new wave overtones, The Killers trade their superfluous Duran Duran tendencies for allusions to U2. And while borrowing from the U2 blueprint worked for everyone from Coldplay and Keane to Bloc Party, it doesn't take on The Killer's foundation of new wave. Where sheer, giddy enjoyment of the act's disposable pop tunes on its last was reason enough for it to exist, Sam's Town shoots to establish The Killers as artists instead of two-dimensional pop stars. It doesn't work. Lead single "When You Were Young" looks back at the band's pop-idol fixation from its pedestal of sincerity, delivering the album's best song. The rest of the record, The Killers grasp desperately to prove they're more than the world's greatest Duran Duran cover band. Sometimes it's with heavy themes ("Uncle Jonny" tilts at tales of addiction), sometimes it's with arena rock posturing ("Read My Mind" sounds like a bad copy of Keane's bad copy of Coldplay's bad copy of U2) or pretentious aural dandruff that brazenly tempts, nay, begs, the world to use the "sophomore slump" cliché.

 

Whether you loved or hated Hot Fuss for it, The Killers' debut was an album that rose and fell on its crafty appropriation of glam-wave's use of the plastic, the disposable and the gleefully fake. In the band's scramble for substance, Sam's Town forces us to realize that The Killers aren't just a fantasy, Las Vegas stand-in for whatever we wanted them to be. They can't be your secret Duran Duran flashback, they can't be that stand-in for the new poppy Cure album, they can't be your David Bowie. They're The Killers -- and damn serious about it. The only problem is, after two years of filling our fantasies, they have nothing to offer when they get rid of everything that was fake about themselves.

 

http://www.aversion.com/bands/reviews.cfm?f_id=2802

 

 

It really pisses me off when people do this, post bad reviews to try and tell us that our opinion is wrong.

 

There are more good reviews for this album than bad if you wanna start a review war.

What the fuck makes their opinion better than ours? Fuck all, so stop posting them like they are the be all and end all of music.

 

By the way, new Killers track here, for us that don`t mind that a band can sometimes take new directions :rolleyes: :-

 

Another Killers Bonus Track - Daddys Eyes

 

 

http://rapidshare.de/files/35582991/TKSTBT-DE.zip.html

stemot1978-Everyone is entitled to their opinion. :rolleyes:.

Btw. Thanks for the bonus track. :kiss:

I liked them a lot, now i don;t

The Killers: Not Enough Like Def Leppard

 

 

Leppard never would've released an album with a cover this lame

 

Chuck Eddy's 1991 book Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe ends in a list of 25 reasons why disco-metal will rule the 90s; his reasons have a lot to do with Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away" and Axl Rose hanging out with George Michael. It didn't happen, of course; metal sludged up and started trying to become as scary as rap, somehow losing all connections to hooks and rhythm somewhere along the way and ending up as the extremely-extreme echo chamber niche market it is now; as much as I love bands like Mastodon and Trivium, neither of them has ever contemplated what they might have to do to get people dancing to their shit. But then, Chuck's take on metal was always a far-left example of popist contrarianism; he lists Teena Marie's Emerald City at #9 and Slayer's Reign in Blood at like #460. When Chuck was writing his book, metal was a dominant pop genre, and maybe it didn't seem entirely unreasonable that metal in particular and mainstream rock in general would pay a little more attention to its rhythms, that it would absorb and internalize the beats from house and synthpop and rap and new-jack swing and all the other beat-driven genres that were flourishing all around it. I finished Chuck's book last night around 4 a.m. and immediately went on an insomnia-driven iTunes spree, buying anything I could find that had even a tertiary relationship to Chuck's idea of disco-metal: Ace Frehley's "New York Groove," Madonna's "Burning Up," Billy Squier's "The Stroke," Def Leppard's Hysteria. Listening today, Hysteria sounds pretty much perfect: an immaculately produced, unapologetically frivolous rock record without any ambitions beyond rocking people and making people happy. There's never been a rock record that sounded remotely like it, and a lot of that comes from a sort of innovation by necessity. Between Pyromania and Hysteria, of course, Leppard drummer Rick Allen lost his arm in a car crash, so the band had to find ways of writing big rock songs around the absurd limitation of a three-limbed drummer. They came up with an elaborate system of electronic drum-triggers that sounded something like the futuristic stomp that Rick Rubin was giving LL Cool J and Run-DMC at the time, and that became the backbone for all their enormous hooks and expensive guitar crunches and gleaming synth arpeggios. It's electro-metal, and it's fun to imagine what might've happened if someone had gone around amputating an arm off every prominent rock drummer at the time just so they would've been forced to catch up with Leppard.

 

Hysteria came out long enough ago that it's hard to imagine a time when anyone would've called it metal; if any band was going to make a 2006 equivalent of Hysteria, it'd have to be the utterly non-metal Killers. At the moment, the Killers are an anomaly: a huge-selling young rock band with a rhythmic dance-pulse, a knack for big hooks, a desire to be something other than comfort food, and a debatable sense of their own ridiculousness. Pretty much every other rock band to achieve any level of popularity in the last few years has either had to resort to emo histrionics (Fall Out Boy), appeals to outmoded ideas of authenticity (the White Stripes), or whooshingly bland stadium-sighs (Coldplay). All three of those approaches can produce occasional great results (Fall Out Boy, the White Stripes, and Coldplay, to name three examples), but none of them is going to give us the next Hysteria. The Killers managed to stand out by streamlining the cooler-than-thou poses of the aborted circa-2001 New Rock Revolution and hooking them up to huge, clean hooks. "Somebody Told Me" felt like fake Faint at first, but that maddeningly alliterative hook wormed its way into brains everywhere and somehow transcended its trite lite androgyny. And "Mr. Brightside" and "All These Things That I've Done" did grandiose mope like no one since, I don't know, Echo & the Bunnymen. At least half of Hot Fuss is full-on garbage, but those singles showed a playful sweep, the kind of winking enormity that actually speaks to people across subcultural barriers and thus finds itself breaking completely out of subcultural ghettos. Hysteria was Def Leppard's follow-up to their pop breakthrough, Pyromania, and they spent a few years honing their already great sound into a monolithic boom-swish that could move mountains. The Killers took about the same amount of time, but they don't focus their strengths on the new album the way Leppard did. Instead, they decided to be cowboys or whatever.

 

Brandon Flowers has brought up Bruce Springsteen as the band's new key influence in every one of the kajillion interviews he's given promoting Sam's Town, but I don't hear much Bruce in this mess. I guess Flowers is writing about "the American masquerade" and his uncle Johnny or whatever, but he can't write a lyric to save his life and no one ever expected him to. The guitars are bigger, but Springsteen's guitars were never particularly huge anyway. So the only real Springsteen echo comes from the fact that most of the songs are constructed in completely counterintuitive ways. Springsteen can sometimes make that work; the Killers can't. Most of the songs on Sam's Town have great glassy intros that go all to shit once the guitar vroom kicks in. "Bling (Confessions of a King)" starts out sounding something like Evanescence: ominous synth-tinkles, florid drama-goth delivery, house kickdrums. But it turns into boring mush-rock before long, switching guitar sounds every five seconds and never settling on a real vocal hook. It's not a depressive anthem like "Mr. Brightside"; it's a blown-out Big Statement. "For Reasons Unknown" has drums that stay frisky and guitars that don't, and its Europop keyboards don't make up for its inert solemnity. The Bryan Adams guitars and fake choir vocals and Panic! at the Disco bloop-organ on "Bones" would all work just fine by themselves, but they never gel. Other tracks make stabs at Arcade Fire and Bright Eyes territory, the sort of grave, passionate squall that this band should never, ever attempt. Sam's Town has a few great songs (the title track, "When You Were Young," "Read My Mind) that'll only get better the more we hear them, but even these songs are stuck with a few touches of self-sabotage like the farting marching-band horns on the title track's outro. The whole album comes with a sad sense that the Killers have abandoned everything that was ever potentially great about them so they could reach for some nebulous notion of artistic transcendence that'll always be beyond them; their brand-new ass-ugly mustaches certainly bear that idea out. There's more sheer exuberance in any random twenty-second chunk of Hysteria than there is in all of Sam's Town, and that counts as a big-ass missed opportunity.

 

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2006/10/the_killers_not.php

I just heard the cd and I gotta say, this is so Springsteen influenced it is nottttt funny. And this is like Born To Run era springsteen here, and kinda Darkness On The Edge of Town too.

That was possibly the most confusing review not written by Frank Gabrenya EVER.

I LOVE this album, they've improved so much.

I haven't ever listened to Springsteen (well maybe on the radio) so I can't make any comparisons. But I'm likeing the new album alot so far. Its different. I'm glad they didn't just release Hot Fuss II.

i am a big fan of the killers and i was a litle iffy about some songs when i heard on mtv.com but now that i own the album i can honestly say the album kicks major ass! i looove uncle johnny read my mind sams town and bling and daddy's eyes is one of there rockiest tunes they should have put that on the cd i love it im so excited to go to their concert i hope they come this way!!!

This album is growing on me. My sister plays it so much, now Im in love with it.

Bling(Confessions of a King) is the best Killers song EVER.

 

 

EVER.

 

:dance:

^Yeah i've gotta say, Bling and Uncle Johnny are coming very close to Jenny Was a Friend of Mine for me - and that's seriously saying something. :stunned:

Really liking the new album. Atm i think my fave tracks on it are Why Do I Keep Counting?, When You Were Young and Read My Mind :thumbsup:

I just got the album on sat, and I love it! The more I listen to it the more the songs grow on me. I'm still not so sure about tracks 10 and 11 but my faves are sam's town, when you where young, bling, for reasons unknown and bones. I'm really happy with the album:D

I just got the album on sat' date=' and I love it! The more I listen to it the more the songs grow on me. I'm still not so sure about tracks 10 and 11 but my faves are sam's town, when you where young, bling, for reasons unknown and bones. I'm really happy with the album:D[/quote']

 

i agree completely im not into the last songs but the rest are incredible i cant stop singing the songs! ive been singing them at work and im singing "uncle johnny did cocaine" and people are staring at me like im psycho!! lol

Sniggerb, I totally agree with you...they actually made an effort to make an album different than Hot Fuss, and I applaud them for that alone. I'll admit it doesn't always work, and the songs do tend to sound more monotonus than on Hot Fuss, but there is some excellent work.

 

Sam's Town, When You Were Young, For Reason's Unknown, Uncle Jonny, and Why Do I Keep Counting are the best tracks. Also, one of the upcoming B Sides, Daddy's Eyes, sounds pretty good, too.

 

And Tim Burton will direct Bones! That in itself is worth getting excited about!

Lol, liz! I love singing that part! And I can't get the songs out of my head.:dance:

 

Ray, I thought you were going to share some of your awesomness with me (b-sides and other stuff) :( Bones directed by Tim Burton! How cool is that?!