The Killers are a band that almost certainly needs no introduction, and that is not said here in the poetic sense. With the entire first half of their 2004 debut Hot Fuss having become a hit parade the likes of which have scarcely been seen since the turn of the millennium, refusing to ever be dislodged from collective adoration, the band went from strength to strength during that decade and beyond. They leveraged their collective showmanship and the lyricism of singer Brandon Flowers in an ascension to the scale of a band that can fill the TD Garden – a level they’ve existed at for quite some time, with this tour finding them sharing the stage with Johnny Marr, with Marr both opening the evening and joining the band late in the night for some unique collaborations.
But ubiquity be damned, The Killers may be wanting for a re-introduction of sorts, as evidenced by their two most recent albums, Imploding the Mirage and Pressure Machine. The former lends their current tour its name and is of the two the more traditionally “Killers” affair. It’s huge and bombastic in most places, awash in grand imagery that suits the big sound and lyrics of lightning fields beset by storms, as well as deep matters of the soul, spirit, and cosmic importance. While The Killers have always engaged heavily with the pop elements of their sound, Flowers has never had the compulsion to reduce it to mere saccharine, and with its underpinnings of faith and internal struggle, Imploding the Mirage is no exception, filling arenas while simultaneously rewarding attentive, multi-leveled listening.
Both ‘My Own Soul’s Warning’ – with which he begins their Boston show as well as the album – and the album-ending title track are some of the finest pieces Flowers and the band have ever assembled; and throughout its songs, he speaks often of ceding control, rejecting cynicism to instead embrace meaning and letting artifice fall away. “Control is overrated,” he declares, a statement that can be understood in a personal and/or spiritual sense. It is an album about being in motion: in the direction of authenticity, and not alone.
Pressure Machine is among the most daring things the band has ever executed, an album centered around Flowers’ upbringing in rural Utah. It’s affixed with spliced tape interviews about conflicting conceptualizations of this small-town life: some swearing it’s a good place despite never having left, others more aware of the darkness that lies underneath that veneer. It too is filled with powerful recurring themes, and scenes of horses running in outright-mythological western hills. The Killers’ music has often confessed a deep admiration for Bruce Springsteen, and regardless of which of their records is most analogous to Born to Run, both obvious and apt comparison for Pressure Machine is, of course, Nebraska.
Subtle and by far darker than anything The Killers have ever done before, Pressure Machine looks at this slice of life, including the American opioid crisis, square in the eye – something Flowers may have been inspired to do by Australian singer Alex Cameron, who opened for the band on a previous tour cycle. Cameron’s longtime associate Jonathan Rado produced both recent Killers records, and Cameron himself has writing credits on Imploding the Mirage. This record too is about a vast distortion, one that can immerse places like the one Flowers once called home – addiction, death, hatred, and others circling in a veiled and sinister gyre. Sonically it’s still a Killers record, of course – but even in its bigger moments, it’s unsettling to hear the band’s sound used to shed light on these vicious anthropological undertows that occasionally reach out and claim a life. Though Pressure Machine doesn’t comprise much of the band’s live set on October 3rd, it’s a fascinating sort of sister record to Imploding the Mirage that warrants exploration, a meaningful confrontation from a band that, admittedly, does open their show with a blast that covers nearly every inch of TD Garden in confetti.
That papery salvo leads into one of their most evergreen hits, ‘When You Were Young’ – although the “he doesn’t look a thing like Jesus” quip now brings to mind the possible naive hopes of the girl from the interview tape who’s never left her deeply religious town. As the confetti alone suggested, the production value of the tour is gargantuan. There are nine band members onstage, including three backing vocalists who throughout the night also pick up a variety of other instruments. A giant neon lemniscate inhabits the center of the stage, and behind that are a pair of keyboards that Flowers occasionally plays when not leaping from one end of the stage to the other, motioning to the crowd throughout their massive repertoire of ever-quotable lyrics. Flowers sounds as good live as he does on the studio album, and in the best way, he gives the distinct impression that he is powered directly by the crowd’s energy like he’s some form of human solar panel. He gets all their arms aloft and swaying for ‘Shot at the Night’, and between tracks takes a moment to declare the event a “super-spreader” – for “peace, love, and rock and roll!” that is, before beckoning, “Come get some!”
“Any Codys in the audience?” he asks soon after, ‘Cody’ being the titular character of a Pressure Machine song; a skeptical, angry kid, stifled and made dangerous. One of only two songs from the album that sees a live performance in Boston, its companion piece in that sense is ‘Runaway Horses’, another character study that moves in a different direction than ‘Cody’ did. On the record, the song also features guest vocals from Phoebe Bridgers. On the subject of guests, after ‘Runaway Horses’, Flowers spots a sign in the crowd and says something about a promise he apparently made a while back. A few seconds later, an audience member named Rashti arrives onstage – apparently Flowers had offered her the opportunity to play piano on ‘A Dustland Fairytale’ some time ago, so they do exactly that. There is a precedent for this at Killers shows, for example back at Boston Calling in 2018 they invited someone onstage to play drums. Rashti conducts the song through its slow beginnings, into a big explosion of sound where it hits its main stride. Flowers comes up near the finish to sing with her at the piano, and afterward, the two share a hug and a selfie, in a sweet moment of watching someone’s dream come true.
The Killers also offer a preview of their next project, which is set to be their eighth studio record. ‘boy’, seemingly a missive from Flowers to his younger self, demonstrates a love for New Order with its electronic drums and Peter Hook-esque bass tone, possibly foreshadowing the palette of the band’s future work – if Pressure Machine was an indicator of something, it’d be that the band has every intention of fully embracing a sound if they find it compelling. Then, positioned far stage right, Flowers covers “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” by Peggy Seeger, although his rendition is more in the tempo of Roberta Flack’s version. When he says “I felt the earth move in my hands,” his hand trembles a bit like something invisible had alighted upon it that he could hold only briefly.
Around the time they reach ‘Runaways’ in the setlist, groups of people in the crowd are discovering that they can collect piles of the previously fallen confetti and toss it in the air again. The song is another jewel honed by the band’s proficiency in hitmaking, and the night has, in addition to the new and unexpected, thus far featured a host of classics including ‘Somebody Told Me’, ‘Human’, and ‘Smile Like You Mean It’, the thousands in attendance singing most of the choruses in each. The band also revisits Imploding the Mirage once again in the final few songs of the night, including ‘Dying Breed’, which in its first few lines paraphrases Springsteen’s ‘Tougher Than the Rest’. ‘Caution’ ends with a shower of sparks cascading down behind the stage, and the faint smell of the magnesium mixture doesn’t reach the halfway point of the arena until the first chorus of set-ender ‘All These Things I’ve Done’. More confetti erupts at the end of the song, this time accompanied by long streamers.
A floating red rock fills the projection screen behind the stage during the encore break, and in the air is a gradually-louder stream of garbled radio transmissions, which rise to meet the intro of ‘Spaceman’. The rock melds into a desert scene with the sky bright above a characteristic sandstone obelisk, yet another indicator of Flowers’ fascination with the cosmic. And for one final spectacle that eclipses even confetti blasted eighty feet into the air, Johnny Marr returns to the stage to perform ‘Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before’ with Flowers on vocals. He sticks around for the final song for the night, which couldn’t be anything else but ‘Mr. Brightside’, which starts with a tease from a remixed version of the song then merges into the original. It’s one in a pantheon of anthems so powerfully catchy that, instead of miring one in the feelings brought on by the lyrical outline of gut-wrenching infidelity, instead helps to exorcize them by screaming into the expanse of an arena with multiple thousands of people doing the same. It’s hard to imagine that song was ever not played to a crowd of this size, even in the first days of the band, simply because this is most certainly how it was always meant to be heard.
Review by Collin Heroux. Photos from The Killers
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