Flamingo

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, pushing surface as substance. 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. This blinkered earnestness blinds him to just how silly all this is. From Flowers’ five-dollar words to the operatic bombast, every little moment of Flamingo carries weight, which means every moment cancels out the one that came before: it’s all sequined stage costumes shimmering under blaring lights. But that’s where the earnestness kicks in and saves him: he’s the diva taking the spotlight for her solo crossed with a schoolboy satisfied with his final project, believing so much in his fussy grandeur that he almost gives Flamingo meaning.