The Killers – Battle Born
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Buy: Battle Born
There’s lots of words that spring to mind when listening to Battle Born – lazy, unimaginative, boring, cynical, patronising, cliche…. but one comes to mind more than any other – ’why’. As in: why the fuck are The Killers still making such uninspired, Springsteen-aping, ‘stadium-ready’ albums? Surely they’ve made enough money by now to not have to work another day in their lives? With that kind of freedom, why are they not experimenting and trying to make something that is actually interesting!?
Maybe they just want to earn even more money, and grab as much cash out of the dwindling music industry as they can – y’know, so a young band with the same dreams and ambitions The Killers once had can’t get their grubby, unworthy mitts on it. Or maybe they just love posing like rock stars in arenas sold out by uneducated first-ever-giggers who think all these anodyne choruses and lots of lights is proper rock music.
Whatever the reason, it amounts to the same thing – Battle Born is a truly banal and utterly forgettable album. There’s barely anything to discern between the tracks, ‘A Matter Of Time’ ups the pace trying to be ‘racy’, and Brandon singing something about a “pitchfork tongue” on ’The Rising Tide’ sticks out a bit – but other than that it’s just one meandering ‘rock ballad’ after another.
No doubt the Radio 1 crowd will lap this derivative shit up and give The Killers another mega-selling album they don’t deserve – but if you want a bit more soul and imagination in your music, you’d be better off watching The X Factor on Saturday night…
