The warning signs were shamelessly emblazoned all over album #2: when The Killers started hanging out with Anton Corbijn, professing a love of Bruce Springsteen and early U2, and cultivating completely unnecessary facial hair growths for the purpose of their new 'image', it was clear that they'd fallen prey to the same fate as Razorlight: believing your own hype. You couldn't have blamed them, though; their brilliant 2004 debut 'Hot Fuss' set them up perfectly for stadium domination, and although Sam's Town was a let-down, it firmly cemented their popularity - they've now sold over twelve million albums worldwide.
So Day & Age should really mean that The Killers are at the height of their power - but their third offering is a remarkably disappointing safe exercise in music-making. Unsurprisingly, Brandon Flowers described it as a 'continuation of Sam's Town', and it's easy to see why: the traces of vitality and enthusiasm that once made the Las Vegas band's songs catchy-as-all-hell are, once again, starkly absent.
There is an undercurrent of passable synth-flavoured doodles on several tracks, though; Human and Spaceman are tolerable, if far from exciting, while the quasi-theatrical build-up of Neon Tiger, and the Latino carnival ambience of Joyride - the latter actually employing a naff saxophone riff - are admittedly memorable (albeit it the same way that Simply Red songs are memorable).
And as with Sam's Town, the best tracks are left until the end, once again teasing us about what could have been. Goodnight, Travel Well is a dark, funereal epic that sees Flowers' croon actually put to use by creating a foreboding tension, while A Crippling Blow's Cockney Rebel-style garage rollick gives the listener something to grab hold of - although it comes too little, too late.
There's no point in wishing that The Killers will make another Hot Fuss, because it's never going to happen. Hoping that they'll make another album that's more killer than filler, however, is another thing altogether.
