The Killers - Wonderful Wonderful (2017)

In 2004, a little band from Las Vegas called The Killers released their first album, Hot Fuss. It rocked the landscape of alternative music, with singles like "Mr. Brightside," "Somebody Told Me," and "All These Things That I've Done" still being played on alt rock stations to this day. That album very much feels like a complete collection of songs and not just like a few tracks slapped together into a record. The same can be said of that album's slightly lesser successor Sam's Town.

As The Killers have continued their career, they have never really been able to replicate the coherence of their first two albums. For me, that's a really big deal: album flow is one of the things I look for the most in my music. Without a good flow, albums become haphazard and feel less polished to my ears and severely degrade in quality.

Thankfully, guys, Wonderful Wonderful is an album that feels like an album. The flow here is much, much smoother than the last two of The Killers' releases, and the songwriting is also a step up. The way the first half of the record comes together feels very polished and completed, especially with the one-two punch of the grand title track that melds the feel of U2's classic Joshua Tree with new school ambient indie pop being followed directly by the Arcade Fire disco-aping "The Man," the infectious lead single. While some of "The Man"'s lyrics are a little hokey (including one crack about being "USDA certified lean"), the track's swagger makes up enough for it that it becomes actually pretty listenable. This flow is definitely the album's biggest strength: partly because The Killers haven't made an album with this much coherence since 2006, partly because it's a really important aspect to an album that ensures that it is taken as one musical composition.

And then there's "Run for Cover," arguably the best Killers song since their debut album. It's modern alt rock gold in its synth-tinged sound and incredibly catchy lyrically and melodically. The same can be said for "Tyson vs. Douglas," which tells a story of Mike Tyson's first career loss (yes, you read that right) and compares it to how the narrator feels like he has to maintain an invincible image for his children. A majority of the first half of this album actually fits into the better half of the Killers' catalog because the songwriting is more focused than their past releases.

However, the second half of this album is where a lot of things start to fall apart. "Some Kind of Love" feels like one of Coldplay's interlude tracks stretched out to four and a half minutes with its overly-simple lyrics and relatively flat dynamics, while "The Calling" just doesn't make any sense with Woody Harrelson narrating Scripture before an industrial pop song about evangelization. The album's closer doesn't do any favors either, asking rather ambiguously if all the songs have been written (which supposedly is a reference to a bout of writer's block that lead vocalist and lyricist Brandon Flowers had during production) over an ambient sonic space that doesn't really go anywhere musically.

Overall, like so many mediocre albums I've reviewed this year, The Killers' Wonderful Wonderful is a tale of two halves. The first half of this record is some of the best stuff the band has put out in years, while the second half wanders around more aimlessly than the first, trying so hard to live up to the standard already set. Thankfully, despite the two halves' differing quality, the two still feel like one coherent musical composition, which greatly makes up for some of that lacking quality.

My rating: 3/5

Best tracks: "Wonderful Wonderful," "Run for Cover," "Rut," "Tyson vs. Douglas"