Apparently not all
the Killers wanted to leave
Sam’s Town behind. Left to his own devices,
Brandon Flowers rushes back to the faded facades, tattered dreams, and overheated pomp of
the Killers’ second album, a divisive lab exercise in splicing the DNA of
Springsteen and
Echo & the Bunnymen.
Flowers’ tales of West Coast losers on a last-chance power drive are pretty much the only differentia between
Flamingo -- with all his neon lights and turned trick cards, it’s surely named after the fabulous casino and not the bird -- and a
Killers album. Perhaps
Flamingo doesn’t push its points as forcefully as it would if
Flowers were backed by
the Killers -- its emphasis is on atmosphere, like most records produced by
Daniel Lanois -- but even without harder rhythms and prominent guitars this is cut from the same cloth as the band’s three albums. So florid are
Flowers' obsessions -- not every songwriter squeezes two song cycles out of Las Vegas -- that it’s always a bit of a shock to realize that he truly, deeply, madly means it all: his odes to Sin City are devoid of irony, his spectacle isn’t meant to have a shred of camp, his mini-epics are intended to paint him as the
Springsteen of the desert. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine