What happens at Killers show stays there

From suntimes.com

May,13 2005

BY ANDERS SMITH LINDALL

Las Vegas sells itself as an escape, a city where reality rarely intrudes on the pursuit of good times and easy money. Want to visit the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, all without leaving one area code? No problem, as long as you're no stickler for authenticity.

The same attitude is evident in Sin City's best-known rock band, the Killers, who headlined a sold-out Riviera Theater on Wednesday night. The quartet's stock in trade is replication, and its goals are mostly hedonistic: Cribbing from the sounds of British pop circa 1985, front man Brandon Flowers and company want to saturate the airwaves and fill the dance floor.

That formula has served the Killers extremely well in the marketplace. In less than a year the band's debut album, "Hot Fuss," has sold more than 2 million copies, spawned hit singles in "Somebody Told Me" and the recently ubiquitous "Mr. Brightside," and garnered three Grammy nominations.

By leap-frogging Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, the Bravery and others to head the class of dance-pop revivalists, the Killers have drawn as much envy as acclaim. The jealousy may be inevitable, but more shows like Wednesday's strong, concise set (they played 13 songs in less than an hour, hardly stopping to chat) should help satisfy the skeptics.

Sure, the band's influences are obvious: the Smiths, the Cure, Duran Duran. Yes, some of the songs are so simplistic as to be crude: "Mr. Brightside" consists of just one punchy verse and a sharp chorus that repeats. And admittedly, when you listen long enough, the band's limited range becomes increasingly apparent.

But the aim is entertainment, not high art, and at that the Killers fared just fine. While the hits, predictably, earned a rapturous reception, album cuts like the synth-driven "On Top" were nearly as effective in moving the crowd.

For as much as the Killers owe to their apparent forebears, the band doesn't rely on the force of one personality so much as the Smiths' Morrissey or the Cure's Robert Smith. Flowers was content just to deliver his lyrics (about girls and boys, clubs and parties, late nights and, yes, killers), using his keyboard mostly as a prop. Likewise, the Killers are significantly less showy than contemporaries like the costumed and choreographed Franz Ferdinand; one of this gig's few trappings, the band's name suspended in 4-foot-high flashing lights, seemed more like an exercise in brand development than stagecraft.

The credit, then, goes to Flowers' typically unsung mates. The nondescript Ronnie Vannucci's drums galloped, gangly Mark Stoermer's bass thrummed insistent sixteenth notes and frizzy-headed David Keuning's treble-heavy guitar lines were nervous needles poking out from the songs -- two of the best were new tunes, supposedly slated for the next Killers release.