Imploding the Mirage
The Killers
2020 – Rock
Island
The new release of the band formed in Las Vegas is the best album they have ever released. Led by Brandon Flowers, they feature a collection of great rock music that surpasses the aesthetics of the arena and achieves something bigger.
During their nearly 20-year career, The Killers never released a really bad project. Always abusing the trends and characteristics of 80s Pop and Rock music, all the albums of the American band—even the dragged and tiring Battle Born—delivered something satisfying, captivating and memorable. Take as an example the band’s debut in 2004, Hot Fuss, which abused synthesizers in a very curious way by creating a kind of subgenre of teenage Rock garage in the early 2000s; or Sam’s Town, which abandoned digital instruments and opted for something more analog, which made the band be compared to Bruce Springsteen. All of these albums have become a milestone in the history of 2000s Pop/Rock. Now in 2020, after allegation of aggression and harassment and discussing the personal traumas of vocalist Brandon Flowers in Wonderful Wonderful, their new album, Imploding the Mirage, emerges as their strongest album so far.
Imploding the Mirage, The Killer’s new set of 10 tracks, is probably the best project they have released to date. Polished with well-written metaphorical and referential lyrics, sweet and captivating hooks and a very well-produced sound composed by synthesizers, guitars, drums and vocal techniques, it comes up as the band’s most different, unique and perhaps ambitious album. Spending its almost 50 minutes playing like a magical, mystical and mythological dream, Mirage abandons its foot on the floor, that was seen in the band’s other albums, seeming to climb up a golden staircase that opened in the middle of sunny flowery fields that would take them to glory. In a nutshell, with the help of playful and vivid images and excited church choirs, The Killers transformed Imploding the Mirage into a kind of intimate religious prophecy.
The strongest point of Mirage is the sound. With the help of vocal effects and autotunes, the band made everything here seem like a kind of grandiose and magical dream, where Flowers looked like a kind of envoy by God who had the mission to tell us moral religious stories. In the first track, “My Own Soul’s Warning,” for example, Flowers addresses a person’s internal conflicts. In the first seconds, with synthesizers sounding spiritually, Brandon appears singing, “I tried going against my own soul’s warning/But in the end, something just didn’t feel right,” and then, in the chorus, everything explodes in a set of sounds that mimic an 80’s video game soundtrack. In addition to the beautifully done transitions, layered vocals and Flowers’ incredible and dedicated voice, the song carries that incredible and contagious energy that makes you want to run as fast as you can. Fortunately, several other tracks on the album sound so magical like this one.
Forming the group of the best songs on the album we have several tracks that, even with some generic and usual moments, end up being captivating, entertaining and enjoyable. In “Blowback,” while the vocalist sings the chorus (“But she’s breathing in the blowback/Born into poor white trash and always typecast/But she’s gonna break out, boy, you’d better know that”), a synthetic guitar appears sounding like a nice whistle, creating one of the coolest moments on the album. “My God,” in turn, brings Weyes Blood alongside Flowers to sing about overcoming. While the vocalist fills the time with very well phrased lines, Blood, a single person, appears in the background acting like a big church choir. While both sing, “Don’t talk to me about forgiveness/My God, just look who’s back in business,” you feel all the “good vibe” that comes from the voices and the instruments. Finally, “Caution” takes on the dreamy effects in a more violent way while Brandon sings about the life of a Las Vegas girl, “Never had a diamond on the sole of her shoes/Just black top, white trash.” Just like the vast majority of tracks on this album, it carries an excellent energy.
Mirage’s only mistakes are tracks that seem lost and tracks that didn’t get as much attention as they should. While “Running Towards a Place” ends up suffering with a very forgettable lyrics and synthesizers that make the song seem like an old attempt to create something modern, “Lightning Fields” ends up having a very weak lyrics that talks about the relationship of Brandon’s parents. Even though the first one has very impressive vocals and the second one has a very good energy, both ended up being one of the weaknesses of the album. However, combining the two cases, “Fire In Bone” appears with a more funky sound aesthetic, which at various times resemble Michael Jackson, and a relatively weak and negatively repetitive lyrics. As much as the lyrics have a very interesting content and the sound of the track, over time, ends up coming to terms with the rest of the album, it is still not something that fits very well within Mirage.
At the end of the album, after “When the Dreams Run Dry” appears with incredible vocals alongside a generic sound that does not bother and ends up working very well here, the album closes with the title track. With a kind of distorted and disturbed bagpipes at first, the track quickly returns to the sweet, bubblegum rhythm that the entire album worked on. Although the track’s chorus sounds pretty boring at first and is not the most striking song, it sounds like a closing film track in which the characters show their learnings and say “goodbye.” He sings, “While you were out there weighing odds/I was imploding the mirage/While you were out there looking like that/I walked right out of the camouflage.” The album ends the same way it started and existed, with magic—notes on a shining piano.
LISTEN ON: Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal
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