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The Killers' Day And Age

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Spaceman
Shades of Queen grace this piston-pumping, fast-paced rocker. A perfect driving song - big drums, big hooks, and a wall of sound.

Joy Ride
The best Bryan Ferry song that Bryan Ferry never wrote. A sensuous, funky beat punctuated by Stones-like sax, biting guitars that tear through the choruses and a melody that hooks you on the first listen. The middle-eight is breathtaking. In fact, the entire band seems to grow more energized as the song progresses. Fun stuff.

A Dustland Fairytale
After a delicate keyboard intro, Brandon Flowers' vocals are appropriately fragile. But as the song swells, with jabbing cellos that seque into a double-time rage, he opens both his heart and his throat. This is a large-canvas narrative with a sound to back it up. Flowers' literary chops are developing in an exciting way.

This Is Your Life
African tribal chanting and harpsichord are strange musical bedfellows, but they spin a magical web on this spacey yet thumping track. Dave Keuning's echo-laden guitar combines with Flowers' barbiturate voice for an overall effect that is spellbinding.

I Can't Stay
A delicious Caribbean beat propels this stunner that features sax, harp and a gently strummed acoustic guitar. A song to sit back and drift away to until a dramatic middle-eight makes you bolt upright and go, "Wow!" Steel drums ride the song out in smashing style.

Brandon Flowers has developed into a world-class vocalist, full of passion.

Neon Tiger
With little fanfare, this mid-tempo grinder gets going and doesn't let up. The instrumentation is perhaps the sparest we've heard yet from The Killers, but the middle section is a marvel of dramatic intensity.

The World We Live In
Melodrama that isn't overwrought or cloying is tricky to pull off. But Flowers' heavily affected, double-tracked voice is a thing of strange beauty here. He's developed into a world-class vocalist, full of passion and searching for the kind of truths that only the finest singer-songwriters can. Although the band provides gutsy support, Flowers owns this untamed monster.

Goodnight, Travel Well
Just as U2 concluded their arguable masterpiece, Achtung Baby!, with a descent into darkness on Love Is Blindness, here too, The Killers bring the curtain down with a seven-minute ride into a nocturnal dreamland. Forlorn and ominous, Flowers sings, "The universe is standing still/and there's nothing I can say/ there's nothing we can do now…nothing we can do now." Get ready for a crushing crescendo in which he's on the floor, begging "Stay!/ don't leave me/ the stars can't wait for you!" Drummer Ronnie Vannucci lets loose with a flurry of crashing cymbals that'll leave you breathless and wondering, it is still night or have we reached the dawn?